[SUMMARY]: Automount/NIS fail over

Thanks to Darren Dunham, Tom Cubanski, Jason Heiss, Sonny Baillargeon,
David Glass for their replies.

The way to get Automount failover configured in an NIS environment is to
add the following line to the auto.share  file

init  -ro NIS1,NIS2:/usr1/share/init

the ro option will make sure that /usr1/share will be mounted as
read-only, as NFS failover will work only with read-only filesystems.

After making this change, failover of the automounted directory is
working, not as perfectly as I would have expected...nevertheless it
works. I find that when NIS1 is brougt down, it takes about 60 seconds for
the clients to realize that NIS1 is down before failing over to NIS2. I
think I have to live with that, unless I find a way to tune the NFS mount
timeout.

--bma

> I have configured an NIS master/slave set up for our environment NIS1 is
> the master and NIS2 is the slave server. NIS1 has a shared directory
> that will be automounted by the clients of the network. In order to
> configure failover mechanism of automount, I have put in place an NIS
> map file auto.share which contains
>
> init    NIS1,NIS2:/usr1/share/&
>
> I have then replicated the NIS1:/usr1/share/init directory onto NIS2
> server using rsync and shared it accross the network using share
> command. I have read that automount failover works only for read only
> file systems. So I have shared the /usr1/share/init directoriies on both
> NIS1 and NIS2 as read-only using the -o ro option
>
> share -F nfs -o ro /usr1/share/init
>
> After having done all this, everything worked perfectly as long as both
> servers were up and running. To test the fail-over, I shutdown NIS1
> while all clients were active and the unexpected (or was it the
> expected) happened:
>
> -all commands on all clients hang ( I guess, the /share/init directory
> is in the front of /usr/bin/ /bin in the PATH environment variable)
> -users not able to login to the environment because the environment
> called from /share/init is not set. ( it gives a prompt after timing out
> on NFS) - cannot cd the /share/init it says NFS timed out waiting for
> NIS1 - it llooks like the NIS failover mechanism worked fine because on
> booting NIS1 again, ypwhich now points to NIS2 on all clients
>
> So it looks to me that all my woes are centered around the automount
> fail-over mechanism. Did I miss something? Or is it that automount just
> doesn;t failover automatically and I have to do something manually to
> set it right. I tried to login through the console of a client and ran
> the automount with no luck. Any help/pointers will be appreciated and
> will summarize. Thanks in advance.
>
> --bma
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