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Disable a NIS client in HPUX

Posted on May 1, 2009
Filed Under Tech, Work | 2 Comments

Today I found myself having to turn a NIS enabled system (NIS client) into a stand-alone server.  Now, how the heck does one do this in HPUX?  As it turns out, it is not that difficult, though there might be a few gotchas along the way. 

Part of decommissioning legacy environments generally means that a single system might need to be left running to handle any remaining tasks that have not been fully decommissioned or disabled.  Our situation is no different as we have a handful of jobs that need to remain active while waiting on development time before they can be ported from Windows to Unix.  The catch here, the system that needs to remain online is part of a NIS domain and we would really like to shutdown the other systems including the NIS master to make progress.

Turning off NIS in HPUX is fairly straight forward. I completed the following two steps:

  1. Stop the NIS client: /sbin/init.d/nis.client stop
  2. Disable service from starting at boot: ch_rc -a -p NIS_CLIENT=0 /etc/rc.config.d/namesvrs

As you can see, these are pretty straight forward commands, nothing major there.

However, this is where things got a little tricky.  We wanted to leave the system in an “as-is” state, as much as possible.  This meant creating a few user accounts that previously existed on the NIS master on the now stand-alone system.  Easy enough, a few useradd commands later and those users now had local accounts and could login…or so I thought.

As it turned out, the permission settings were cached and existing users while appearing to be the owner of their respective home directories, were not.  New user accounts meant new UIDs and thus a mismatch from the previous UID.

The solution?  A quick chmod -R user_name:group_name /home/user_name/ and everything was back to normal.  Users had proper access to their home directories and could write files as needed.

We probably could have just simply rebooted the system to completely clear out the NIS involvment, but did not really want to take that measure if not absolutely needed.

With any luck the developer will have time in the coming few weeks to finish porting these jobs from Windows to Unix and these jobs can get fully migrated to the new Unix application server.

All for now.

Virtual Fight?

Posted on May 1, 2009
Filed Under Family, Fun | 2 Comments

And so it goes on a rainy Friday on the Intertubes…

Andrea:  me/ punches you :-p
me:  /me
Andrea:  whatever!!
me:  hehe
Andrea:  We’re in a FIGHT!

All for now.

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