OS

NIS+ The CNS Guide to NIS+

The CNS Guide to NIS+ The Document The CNS Guide to NIS+ is a document I wrote while installing and administering a small NIS+ space, built on a handful of Solaris 2.6 and Solaris 2.7 machines. Please feel free to grab a copy of this document in Microsoft Word 2000 format and modify it as you see fit. The most recent version is dated March 4, 2002. What is NIS+? [Excerpted from "The CNS Guide to NIS+"] "...There are lots of answers to this question. Here is mine. NIS+ is a storage mechanism for holding databases. It supports hierarchical access and administration over these databases . It supports replica servers in a single-master scheme. Interactions between NIS+ servers and clients are authenticated via a Diffie-Hellman exchange. By default, NIS+ ships with support for common Unix flat files. Here is the list of default databases which NIS+ supports; notice how most of them are also popular Unix flat files. aliases auto_home auto_master bootparams ethers group hosts netgroup netid netmasks networks passwd protocols publickey rpc services shadow timezone As a result, NIS+ can be used as semi-secure way to distribute and maintain access to this common Unix data across a collection of Solaris boxes, as well as to provide semi-secure support for common RPC protocols, like NFS and sadmind (Sun’s AdminSuite package). The administrator can create additional databases. This is a tremendously powerful feature of NIS+, and one which I barely exploit in this document, with the creation of the auto_direct table. Socio-politically, NIS+ belongs to the ONC specification, in particular to the Secure RPC portion of ONC. Despite its openness, only Sun has ever shipped a NIS+ implementation. Despite the similarity in names between NIS (formerly YP) and NIS+, the two have little in common..."