NIS exhausts system resources

[Terry Lambert]

Dan Nelson wrote:
> In the last episode (Apr 08), Terry Lambert said:
> > Dan Pelleg wrote:
> > > When does this happen, you ask? I triggered it this morning by
> > > booting the machine when the NIS server was down. I had also seen
> > > it in the past when configuring NIS, and it happened as soon as I
> > > set the domainname.  Any ideas? I can provide packet captures on
> > > request, however note the failure where the server is down.
> >
> > Historical behaviour when the NIS server is down has been for the
> > client machines to hang until the NIS server is back up.
> 
> I've never seen that here.

I used to run a SPARC SunOS 4.1.3_U1 client machine off an SunOS 4.1.3_U2
NIS server as my primary engineering workstation.  Trust me, the FreeBSD
code is different.


> I have three NIS servers though, so there
> has never been a case when all NIS resources were unavailable.  Usually
> what I see in the logs are:
> 
> Mar 12 13:52:13 ypbind[113]: NIS server [10.0.0.11] for domain not responding
> Mar 12 13:52:13 ypbind[113]: NIS server [10.0.0.89] for domain OK
> 
> Was it ypbind that was hogging all the file descriptors, or what, I
> wonder?

No.  Likely, it was something that held an unrelated descriptor
open over a call to the NIS as a result of some map lookup, rather
than closing the unrelated descriptor before making the map request.

The big hint here is that it was complaining about /etc/hosts.access
while a broken NIS request was still outstanding.

-- Terry