The nis_cachemgr daemon maintains a cache of NIS+ directory objects and active servers for domains. It is responsible for locating servers for a domain on behalf of client processes. This improves performance because only one process has to search for servers. The cache contains location information necessary to contact the NIS+ servers. This includes transport addresses, information neeeded to authenticate the server, and a time to live field which gives a hint on how long the directory object can be cached. The cache helps to improve the performance of the clients that are traversing the NIS+ name space. nis_cachemgr should be running on all the machines that are using NIS+. However, it is not required that the nis_cachemgr program be running in order for NIS+ requests to be serviced.

The cache maintained by this program is shared by all the processes that access NIS+ on a machine. The cache is maintained in a file that is memory mapped by all the processes. See mmap(2). On start up, nis_cachemgr initializes the cache from the cold start file and preserves unexpired entries that already exist in the cache file. See nisinit(1M). Thus, the cache survives machine reboots.

The nis_cachemgr program is normally started from a system startup script. nisshowcache(1M) can be used to look at the cached objects and active servers.

The nisprefadm(1M) command can be used to control which NIS+ servers the nis_cachemgr program will try to select.

The nis_cachemgr program makes NIS+ requests under the NIS+ principal name of the host on which it runs. Before running nis_cachemgr, security credentials for the host should be added to the cred.org_dir table in the host's domain using nisaddcred(1M). Credentials of type DES will be needed if the NIS+ service is operating at security level 2 (see rpc.nisd(1M)). See the DIAGNOSTICS section, below. Additionally, a "keylogin -r " should be done on the machine.

-i

Force nis_cachemgr to ignore the previous cache file and reinitialize the cache from just the cold start file. By default, the cache manager initializes itself from both the cold start file and the old cache file, thereby maintaining the entries in the cache across machine reboots.

-v

This flag sets verbose mode. In this mode, the nis_cachemgr program logs not only errors and warnings, but also additional status messages. The additional messages are logged using syslog(3C) with a priority of LOG_INFO.

/var/nis/NIS_SHARED_DIRCACHE

the shared cache file

/var/nis/NIS_COLD_START

the coldstart file

/etc/init.d/rpc

initialization scripts for NIS+

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

keylogin(1), nisaddcred(1M), nisinit(1M), nisprefadm(1M), nisshowcache(1M), rpc.nisd(1M), mmap(2), rpc(3NSL), syslog(3C), nisfiles(4), attributes(5)

The nis_cachemgr daemon logs error messages and warnings using syslog(3C). Error messages are logged to the DAEMON facility with a priority of LOG_ERR . Warning messages are logged with a priority of LOG_WARNING. Additional status messages can be obtained using the -v option.

NIS+ might not be supported in future releases of the Solaris Operating Environment. Tools to aid the migration from NIS+ to LDAP are available in the Solaris 9 operating environment. For more information, visit http://www.sun.com/directory/nisplus/transition.html.