Chapter Summary

   

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NIS provides a centralized host and user information. It is based on a flat name space called an NIS domain. A master NIS server in the domain keeps the central NIS information in dbm format, called NIS maps. One or more NIS slave servers can be used within an NIS domain. The slave servers take their information from the master server. NIS is also known as Yellow Pages, and most of the NIS command names start with yp . All NIS servers are also NIS clients at the same time.

NIS domain names can be set using the domainname command or the NIS_DOMAIN variable in the /etc/rc.config.d/namesvrs file, where a number of other variables are also defined. The ypserv daemon is started on the NIS server and the ypbind daemon is used on an NIS client. In addition to that, a number of other daemons are used to carry out different tasks . Both master and slave servers are configured using the ypinit command. However, different command-line switches are used for master and slave servers. NIS map files are kept in the /var/yp directory. The /etc/nsswitch.conf file is used to define the order in which different services are tried while searching for particular information. The ypmake command is used to regenerate NIS maps. Users can change their passwords using the passwd or yppasswd command.

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