Planning the NIS Network

If your site is divided into multiple administrative departments, with a different system administrator for each department, you should allow each system administrator to maintain a separate NIS domain.

If your site is divided into multiple administrative departments, and each department requires different configuration data and allows access to different users and hosts, you should create a separate NIS domain for each administrative department.

You must put a server on each subnetwork in your domain. When a client starts up, it broadcasts a message to find the nearest server. This broadcast message is not propagated across routers or gateways, so each subnet must have at least one server.

In general, a server can serve about 30 NIS clients if the clients and servers run at the same speed. If the clients are faster than the servers, you will need more servers. If the clients are slower than the servers, each server can serve 50 or more clients.

Choose servers that are reliable and highly available.

Choose fast servers that are not used for CPU-intensive applications. Do not use gateways or terminal servers as NIS servers.

Distribute servers appropriately among client networks. Because an NIS client can bind only to a server on its own subnet, each subnet must have enough servers to accommodate the clients on that subnet.