Linux Administration: A Beginner’s Guide, Seventh Edition, 7th Edition

CHAPTER 26

Network Information Service (NIS)

The Network Information Service (NIS) facilitates the sharing of critical data stored in flat files among systems on a network. In managing a network consisting of many systems/hosts, it is often ideal to have a common repository (such as NIS) for storing user and group information traditionally stored in flat files such as /etc/passwd and /etc/group. Making such files available via NIS would allow any remote and properly configured NIS client machine to access or query the data contained in these shared files and use the network versions of these files as extensions to the local versions. NIS is not limited to sharing just those two files. And as a matter of fact, any tabular file in which at least ...