Let us assume that you have already setup your NFS and NIS server. Now you need to configure your clients. Here are the steps you can follow to configure them in 5 minutes or less:

Several years ago I noticed a big issue with NIS security at Sun, which I promptly reported hoping for a patch. Today I found out it is still there. Hopefully a full disclosure will help solve it. In typical NFS-NIS setup, users on NIS client machines login to their NIS accounts (like Windows users login to their domain server). Normally root access in local machines are provided to users to make it easy to install software. In NIS, by default, root squash feature is implemented which prevents local root account from accessing NIS mounted directories. So far so good. However, unknown to most, a bug in NIS implementation allows local root accounts to access all information in any NIS users accounts.

I faced an extremely weird problem of ghost DNS lookups on machines configured as NFS clients. It took quite an effort to solve it. Here are the details.