Introduction to NIS

A primary goal of a LAN administrator is to make the network transparent to users. One aspect of this transparency is presenting users with similar environments, including username and password, when they log in on different machines. From the administrator's perspective, the information that supports a user's environment should not be replicated but rather should be kept in a central location and distributed as requested. NIS simplifies this task.

As with DNS, users need not be aware that NIS is managing system configuration files. Setting up and maintaining NIS databases are tasks for the system administrator; individual users and users on single-user Linux systems rarely need to work directly with NIS.

Yellow Pages

NIS used to be called the Yellow Pages, and some people still refer to it by this name. Sun renamed the service because another corporation holds the trademark to that name. The names of NIS utilities and files, however, are reminiscent of the old name: ypcat displays and ypmatch searches an NIS file, and the server daemon is named ypserv.