I have a large environment with many VLANs and NIS slaves serving the VLANs. Previously we have not used a securenets file (don't worry; we don't use NIS for passwords, just NFS maps), but I'd like to start. The number of NIS slaves makes it annoying to update a securenets file on each when we add a new VLAN. Is there a way to propagate the securenets file to each slave when I update it on the master?

If not, I guess I can live with propagating the file once and only visiting new slaves when I build them, because in 99% of cases a NIS slave only serves its own subnet.

Could you use something like rsync? Perhaps instead of sending the file from the master, each slave could pull the file from the master on a periodic basis.