17.1. Introduction to NIS
NIS was originally developed by Sun Microsystems, but is now available on Linux and many other UNIX operating systems. Its original name was YP (Yellow Pages), which is why many of the NIS commands start with yp.
On a network with many systems, users may be allowed to log in to any of those systems. Typically, to avoid having to create and update users on each system separately, NIS can be used to distribute a master list of users and groups to all hosts. Although distributing user and group information is the most common use of NIS, it can also be used to share hostnames and IP addresses, automounter maps, Internet services, and netgroups.
An NIS server is a system that stores tables of user, group, and other information. ...
Get Managing Linux® Systems with Webmin™ System Administration and Module Development now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
