Solaris™ Operating Environment Boot Camp

How NIS Works

NIS is a commonly used naming service that was originally known as Yellow Pages (YP), but had to be renamed to avoid conflict with the UK telephone company British Telecommunications. In fact, we can see from the manual page listing that many of the commands still refer to the older naming convention (ypbind, ypcat, etc.).

NIS uses a client-server concept similar to many other naming services. This approach ensures that we don't get data replication problems because the “real” data resides only on one main server. Through the use of slaves, NIS provides server redundancy to ensure that the data is still available if the master server fails.

So, how does NIS work? First, we define something known as a NIS domain. This is really just ...