YP required with NFS?

[Barry Shein]

>Yes, yp is fundamentally the wrong way to do things. On SVR3 RFS you
>can also do what you are talking about. Just use remote versions of any
>files in question either via a symlink (on a sun) OR by just remotely mounting
>a subtree over the one on a client machine. This may cleaner and easier
>to manage. I have seen the latter on RFS and it is much more reasonable.
>The clients also tend to survive server crashes quite well.
>
>     Steve Blasingame (under Monster Island)

Well, puff puff puff.

I don't think it's obvious that "yp is fundamentally the wrong way
to do things" [I'm not even sure what it means.]

This idea of mapping a single file might be fine in a trivial network,
but what exactly do you do when your hosts file (for example) is
mapped out across many systems, such as the internet's is (and
maintained in pieces by many entities, who are the only one's who have
the slightest idea what new machines are coming and going in their
region.) Yp may not fully solve this (tho it sort of does now by
interfacing to the name server, thanks Bill), but mapping a flat file
will surely never solve it.

Similarly for password files, can this scheme allow a local, user
editable password file and a remote, more global password file? The
root password on my diskless SUN is surely different than the server's
(a local entry overrides) but otherwise I just map into the server's
file (security problem you say? what isn't! and I don't see how this
scheme for RFS ameliorates this problem except perhaps by severely
restricting possibilities.)

Far be it for me to say that yp is perfect, but I don't think bashing
it as fundamentally wrong is any help either, the people that designed
it weren't idiots, mapping a file over NFS would have been the easy
thing to do (and is done sometimes, our termcap entries are like this
tho it could be yp'd to some advantage, minor issue.) There were real
issues it addresses. Let's not let some operational issues besmear a
fundamentally good idea.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University