I do not usually blog technical crap but today I will make the exception. I recently had to deploy a NIS domain on dual IP-ed network. I buried the NIS servers on the non-public domain (Yeah I was thinking 'bout security). Since we do not have a DNS replication server locally, the NIS servers are NOT visible on the in the DNS domain. Ironically, all functions that touched NIS authentication where slow as molasses. I have to send props out to Jason Armistead for finding my needle in the hay stack. His contribution: DNS lookups and /etc/nsswitch.conf save my ass and fixed my problem. Basically - since the NIS process was running with the -d option it forced the DNS lookups. Since the servers could not see DNS they would wait for the time out (@45 seconds per transaction). Basically- remove the /etc/resolv.conf and and restart NIS. That works great!!!
