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RPC.YPXFRD(8) FreeBSD System Manager's Manual RPC.YPXFRD(8)
NAME
rpc.ypxfrd - NIS map transfer server
SYNOPSIS
rpc.ypxfrd [-p path]
DESCRIPTION
The rpc.ypxfrd utility is used to speed up the distribution of very large
NIS maps from NIS master to NIS slave servers. The normal method for
transferring maps involves several steps:
o The master server calls yppush(8) to inform the slave servers
to start a transfer.
o The slave servers invoke ypxfr(8), which reads the entire
contents of a map from the master server using the yp_all()
function.
o The ypxfr(8) program then creates a new map database file by
using the db(3) library hash method to store the data that it
receives from the server.
o When all the data has been retrieved, ypxfr(8) moves the new
file into place and sends ypserv(8) on the local machine a
YPPROC_CLEAR to tell it to refresh its database handles.
This process can take several minutes when there are very large maps
involved. For example: a passwd database with several tens of thousands
of entries can consume several megabytes of disk space, and it can take
the db(3) library package a long time to sort and store all the records
in a hash database. Consider also that there are two sets of map files:
master.passwd.by{name,uid} and passwd.by{name,uid}.
The rpc.ypxfrd utility speeds up the transfer process by allowing NIS
slave servers to simply copy the master server's map files rather than
building their own from scratch. Simply put, rpc.ypxfrd implements an
RPC-based file transfer protocol. Transferring even a multi-megabyte
file in this fashion takes only a few seconds compared to the several
minutes it would take even a reasonably fast slave server to build a new
map from scratch.
The rpc.ypxfrd utility uses the same access restriction mechanism as
ypserv(8). This means that slave servers will only be permitted to
transfer files if the rules in the securenets database permit it (see
ypserv(8) for more information on securenets). Furthermore, only slave
servers using reserved ports will be allowed to transfer the
master.passwd maps.
OPTIONS
The following option is available:
-p path
This option can be used to override the default path to the
location of the NIS map databases. The compiled-in default path
is /var/yp.
FILES
Bill Paul <wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu>
BUGS
The FreeBSD ypxfrd protocol is not compatible with that used by SunOS.
This is unfortunate but unavoidable: Sun's protocol is not freely
available, and even if it were it would probably not be useful since the
SunOS NIS v2 implementation uses the original ndbm package for its map
databases whereas the FreeBSD implementation uses Berkeley DB. These two
packages use vastly different file formats. Furthermore, ndbm is byte-
order sensitive and not very smart about it, meaning that am ndbm
database created on a big endian system cannot be read on a little endian
system.
FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE-p11 June 2, 1996 FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE-p11