5.5. Migrating from NIS to DNS for host naming

By now you should have a good handle on the differences between NIS and DNS as they impact host naming. If you are considering migrating from NIS to DNS, you need to decide what you want to do about unqualified versus qualified hostnames. By going from NIS to DNS, you are exposing your users to a hierarchical (qualified) naming scheme versus the flat (unqualified) one they knew under NIS. While you don't want to continue a flat naming scheme for accessing hosts outside the user's subdomain, you may want to temporarily or permanently support a flat naming scheme for hosts within each user's subdomain, using techniques described earlier. Such an approach also gives you more time to find all references to unqualified hostnames in configuration files and in software packages and correct them to be qualified.

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