> As far as NIS is concerned, I am sorry but I don't know how it is used by MIDAS.

NIS is traditionally used together with autofs to form clusters of UNIX/Linux machines. NIS is a database
of user names, passwords, home directories, NFS (autofs) mount points and NFS exports. autofs would
read all it's configuration from the NIS database.

So the correct boot sequence in most cases would be like this:
hardware init -> network init -> nis -> autofs -> users can login -> start midas (mhttpd) from cron @reboot or similar.

(In organizations that have a dedicated staff of IT sysadmins, you would see LDAP instead of NIS).

K.O.