0.3. Organization

This book is divided into two sections. The first twelve chapters contain explanations of the implementation and operation of NFS and NIS. Chapter 13, "Network Diagnostic and Administrative Tools" through Chapter 18, "Client-Side Performance Tuning" cover advanced administrative and debugging techniques, performance analysis, and tuning. Building on the introductory material, the second section of the book delves into low-level details such as the effects of network partitioning hardware and the various steps in a remote procedure call. The material in this section is directly applicable to the ongoing maintenance and debugging of a network.

Here's the chapter-by-chapter breakdown:

• Chapter 1, "Networking Fundamentals" provides an introduction to the underlying network protocols and services used by NFS and NIS.

• Chapter 2, "Introduction to Directory Services " provides a survey of the popular directory services.

• Chapter 3, "Network Information Service Operation" discusses the architecture of NIS and its operation on both NIS servers and NIS clients. The focus is on how to set up NIS and its implementation features that affect network planning and initial configuration.

• Chapter 4, "System Management Using NIS" discusses operational aspects of NIS that are important to network administrators. This chapter explores common NIS administration techniques, including map management, setting up multiple NIS domains, and using NIS with domain name services.

• Chapter 5, "Living with Multiple Directory Servers " explains the issues around using both NIS and the Directory Name Service (DNS) on the same network.

• Chapter 6, "System Administration Using the Network File System" covers basic NFS operations, such as mounting and exporting filesystems.

• Chapter 7, "Network File System Design and Operation" explains the architecture of NFS and the underlying virtual filesystem. It also discusses the implementation details that affect performance, such as file attributes and data caching.

• Chapter 8, "Diskless Clients" is all about diskless clients. It also presents debugging techniques for clients that fail to boot successfully.

• Chapter 9, "The Automounter" discusses the automounter, a powerful but sometimes confusing tool that integrates NIS administrative techniques and NFS filesystem management.

• Chapter 10, "PC/NFS Clients " covers PC/NFS, a client-side implementation of NFS for Microsoft Windows machines.

• Chapter 11, "File Locking " focuses on file locking and how it relates to NFS.

• Chapter 12, "Network Security" explores network security. Issues such as restricting access to hosts and filesystems form the basis for this chapter. We'll also go into how to make NFS more secure, including a discussion of setting up NFS security that leverages encryption for stronger protection.

• Chapter 13, "Network Diagnostic and Administrative Tools" describes the administrative and diagnostic tools that are applied to the network and its systems as a whole. This chapter concentrates on the network and on interactions between hosts on the network, instead of the per-machine issues presented in earlier chapters. Tools and techniques are described for analyzing each layer in the protocol stack, from the Ethernet to the NFS and NIS applications.

• Chapter 14, "NFS Diagnostic Tools" focuses on tools used to diagnose NFS problems.

• Chapter 15, "Debugging Network Problems" describes how to debug common network problems.

• Chapter 16, "Server-Side Performance Tuning" discusses how to tune your NFS and, to a lesser extent, NIS servers.

• Chapter 17, "Network Performance Analysis" covers performance tuning and analysis of machines and the network.

• Chapter 18, "Client-Side Performance Tuning" explores NFS client tuning, including NFS mount parameter adjustments.

• Appendix A, "IP Packet Routing" explains how IP packets are forwarded to other networks. It is additional background information for discussions of performance and network configuration.

• Appendix B, "NFS Problem Diagnosis" summarizes NFS problem diagnosis using the NFS statistics utility and the error messages printed by clients experiencing NFS failures.

• Appendix C, "Tunable Parameters" summarizes parameters for tuning NFS performance and other attributes.

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