YP required with NFS?

[Bill Shannon]

In article <2231 at brl-adm.ARPA>, @BERKELEY.EDU> writes:
> ...  A nice, simple
> approach would be to make /etc/hosts, and other such things a symlink
> onto a remote mounted file system. I can't see any problems with that
> approach, (other than needing the real files there while you boot),
> but there are probably some. 

Well, you named one problem.  Another is that you have no distribution
of the data so if you have (say) 10 netowrks with 400 machines, they
would all depend on one central machine for the databases.  Also, think
about what happens when that machine goes down.  YP distributes that
load among multiple servers and provides some fault tolerance in the
face of YP server crashes.

All of these are good reasons to keep the name server separate from the
file server.  As has been said elsewhere, in small configurations the
costs may outweight the advantages.  In large configurations I believe
the opposite is true.

					Bill Shannon