YP required with NFS?

[bsteve at gorgo.UUCP]

>This scheme (symlinks) symlinks doesn't scale very well, though.  One of the
>main problems is robustness.

Agreed. This is why the mapping should be done with more than one server.
If the primary server dies, nothing should happen to the client machines.

>A distributed nameserver package (such as
>Berkeley's BIND, included with 4.3) offers this flexibility.

This is also a nice idea, but doesn't really attack the problem of dealing
with active processes on clients when a server host goes down.

In reality (in response to Barry (flames in net.sources) Shein),
I think that yp does a pretty good job of handling the problem on large
networks. However, it has some *very* undesireable features. Users should
not have to care about the location of a file on the network. When I type
'cat /etc/passwd', I should see the same version of the file on both servers
and on my client machine OR I should see only the version of the file that
is important on my  client. The business of ypcat and its friends is klugy.
Lets make them go away and fully abstract the mapping of files across the
network as well as incorporate primary and secondary server hosts for groups
of clients, to make the network more resistant to server crashes.

To clarify all of this.. yp is not 'bad' pe se, but we need something better.

     Steve Blasingame
     ihnp4!occrsh!gorgo!bsteve
     bsteve at eris.berkeley.edu