Network Information Service

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Network Information Service, or NIS (originally called Yellow Pages or YP), is a

host names between computers on a computer network. Sun Microsystems developed the NIS; the technology is licensed to virtually all other Unix
vendors.

Because

Yellow Pages" as a registered trademark in the United Kingdom for its paper-based, commercial telephone directory, Sun changed the name of its system to NIS, though all the commands and functions still start with "yp".[1]

A NIS/YP system maintains and distributes a central directory of user and group information, hostnames, e-mail aliases and other text-based tables of information in a computer network. For example, in a common

/etc/passwd and secret authentication hashes in /etc/shadow. NIS adds another "global" user list which is used for identifying users on any client
of the NIS domain.

Administrators have the ability to configure NIS to serve password data to outside processes to authenticate users using various versions of the Unix crypt(3) hash algorithms. However, in such cases, any NIS(0307) client can retrieve the entire password database for offline inspection.

Successor technologies

The original NIS design was seen to have inherent limitations, especially in the areas of scalability and security, so other technologies have come to replace it.

Sun introduced

Solaris 2 in 1992, with the intention for it to eventually supersede NIS. NIS+ features much stronger security and authentication features, as well as a hierarchical design intended to provide greater scalability and flexibility. However, it was also more cumbersome to set up and administer, and was more difficult to integrate into an existing NIS environment than many existing users wished. NIS+ has been removed from Solaris 11.[2]

As a result, many users choose to stick with NIS, and over time other modern and secure distributed directory systems, most notably

root user, and SASL
-based encryption of LDAP traffic is natively supported.

On large

NFS
database information file as well as so called maps.

See also

References

  1. ISBN 9780596555634
    .
  2. ^ "End of Feature Notices for Oracle Solaris 11". Oracle Corporation. 2012-12-20.

External links

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