Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second Edition

Chapter 13. The Network Information System

When you’re running a local area network, your overall goal is usually to provide an environment for your users that makes the network transparent. An important stepping stone is keeping vital data such as user account information synchronized among all hosts. This provides users with the freedom to move from machine to machine without the inconvenience of having to remember different passwords and copy data from one machine to another. Data that is centrally stored doesn’t need to be replicated, so long as there is some convenient means of accessing it from a network-connected host. By storing important administrative information centrally, you can make ensure consistency of that data, increase flexibility for the users by allowing them to move from host to host in a transparent way, and make the system administrator’s life much easier by maintaining a single copy of information to maintain when required.

We previously discussed an important example of this concept that is used on the Internet—the Domain Name System (DNS). DNS serves a limited range of information, the most important being the mapping between hostname and IP address. For other types of information, there is no such specialized service. Moreover, if you manage only a small LAN with no Internet connectivity, setting up DNS may not seem to be worth the trouble.

This is why Sun developed the Network Information System (NIS). NIS provides generic database access facilities ...