Managing NFS and NIS

Mike Eisler graduated from the University of Central Florida with a master's degree in computer science in 1985. His first exposure to NFS and NIS came while working for Lachman Associates, Inc., where he was responsible for porting NFS and NIS to System V platforms. He later joined Sun Microsystems, Inc., as a member of the Solaris Network Technology group, responsible for projects such as NFS server performance, NFS/TCP, WebNFS, NFS secured with Kerberos V5, and NFS Version 4. He later moved to Sun's Java Customer Engineering group, working with JavaCard technology. Mike has authored or coauthored several Request For Comments documents for the Internet Engineering Task Force, relating to NFS and security. He is currently a Distinguished Software Engineer for Zambeel, Inc. Ricardo Labiaga is a staff engineer at Sun Microsystems, Inc., where he concentrates on networking and wireless technologies. Ricardo spent 8 years in the Solaris NFS group at Sun, where he worked on a variety of development projects with a primary focus on automounting and the NFS server. Ricardo is responsible for implementing significant functionality and performance enhancements to the automounter, as well as leading the NFS Server Logging design team. He holds a master of science degree in computer engineering from The University of Texas at El Paso. Hal Stern is a technical consultant with Sun Microsystems, where he specializes in networking, performance tuning, and kernel hacking. Hal earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Princeton University in 1984. Before joining Sun, Hal was a member of the technical staff at Polygen Corporation, developing UNIX-based molecular modelling and chemical information system products. Hal also worked on the Massive Memory Machine project as a member of the Research Staff in Princeton University's Department of Computer Science. His interests include large installation system administration, virtual memory management systems, performance, local and wide-area networking, interactive graphics, applications in financial services, cosmology, and the history of science. Hal is active in the Sun User's Group and has served on the advisory trustee board of the Princeton Broadcasting Service for seven years. Hal and his wife Toby live in Burlington, Massachusetts. At home, Hal enjoys carpentry, jazz music, cooking, and watching the stock market

Preface 1. Networking Fundamentals Networking overview Physical and data link layers Network layer Transport layer The session and presentation layers 2. Introduction to Directory Services Purpose of directory services Brief survey of common directory services Name service switch Which directory service to use 3. Network Information Service Operation Masters, slaves, and clients Basics of NIS management Files managed under NIS Trace of a key match 4. System Management Using NIS NIS network design Managing map files Advanced NIS server administration Managing multiple domains 5. Living with Multiple Directory Servers Domain name servers Implementation Fully qualified and unqualified hostnames Centralized versus distributed management Migrating from NIS to DNS for host naming What next? 6. System Administration Using the Network File System Setting up NFS Exporting filesystems Mounting filesystems Symbolic links Replication Naming schemes 7. Network File System Design and Operation Virtual filesystems and virtual nodes NFS protocol and implementation NFS components Caching File locking NFS futures 8. Diskless Clients NFS support for diskless clients Setting up a diskless client Diskless client boot process Managing client swap space Changing a client's name Troubleshooting Configuration options Brief introduction to JumpStart administration Client/server ratios 9. The Automounter Automounter maps Invocation and the master map Integration with NIS Key and variable substitutions Advanced map tricks Side effects 10. PC/NFS Clients PC/NFS today Limitations of PC/NFS Configuring PC/NFS Common PC/NFS usage issues Printer services 11. File Locking What is file locking? NFS and file locking Troubleshooting locking problems 12. Network Security User-oriented network security How secure are NIS and NFS? Password and NIS security NFS security Stronger security for NFS Viruses 13. Network Diagnostic and Administrative Tools Broadcast addresses MAC and IP layer tools Remote procedure call tools NIS tools Network analyzers 14. NFS Diagnostic Tools NFS administration tools NFS statistics snoop Publicly available diagnostics Version 2 and Version 3 differences NFS server logging Time synchronization 15. Debugging Network Problems Duplicate ARP replies Renegade NIS server Boot parameter confusion Incorrect directory content caching Incorrect mount point permissions Asynchronous NFS error messages 16. Server-Side Performance Tuning Characterization of NFS behavior Measuring performance Benchmarking Identifying NFS performance bottlenecks Server tuning 17. Network Performance Analysis Network congestion and network interfaces Network partitioning hardware Network infrastructure Impact of partitioning Protocol filtering 18. Client-Side Performance Tuning Slow server compensation Soft mount issues Adjusting for network reliability problems NFS over wide-area networks NFS async thread tuning Attribute caching Mount point constructions Stale filehandles A. IP Packet Routing B. NFS Problem Diagnosis C. Tunable Parameters Index