If the hardware isn't completely identical then it is reasonable to
have differences in the parallel boot timings.
Using it with NIS/YP is not so common so I think it
not unlikely that there is a bug related to it there.
That seems like a completely separate issue. Probably should separate
the two problems and address each one individually. Would be happy to
help with the DNS configuration too. Describe how it is set up and
the list could provide feedback on how to improve it.
DNS is a marvelously designed distributed database system... ... But it is only as good as the configured network around it.
Try this experiment. At the last point in the /etc/init.d/nis startup
script add a short sleep. That will give the daemons time to finish
and get ready to go. It is possible that they are not yet quite ready
yet and so immediately after the end of the script the next one to run
hits them too early.
I suggest changing this in file /etc/init.d/nis:
case "$1" in
start)
do_start
;;
stop)
To this as an experiment:
case "$1" in
start)
do_start
sleep 5 # <-- Add this sleep to give things more time.
;;
stop)