Choosing the Right Maps
Having made sure you can reach the NIS server, you have to decide which
configuration files to replace or augment with NIS maps. Commonly, you
will want to use NIS maps for the host and password lookup functions. The
former is especially useful if you do not have the BIND name service. The
password lookup lets all users log into their accounts from any system in the
NIS domain; this usually goes along with sharing a central
/home
directory among all hosts via NFS. The password
map is explained detail in the next section.
Other maps, like services.byname
, don’t provide such
dramatic gains, but do save you some editing work. The
services.byname
map is valuable if you install
any network applications that use a service name not in the standard
services
file.
Generally, you want to have some choice of when a lookup function uses the
local files, when it queries the NIS server, and when it uses other servers
such as DNS. GNU libc allows you to configure the order in which a function
accesses these services. This is controlled through the
/etc/nsswitch.conf
file, which stands for
Name Service Switch, but of course isn’t limited to
the name service. For any of the data lookup functions supported by GNU libc,
the file contains a line naming the services to use.
The right order of services depends on the type of data each service is
offering. It is unlikely that the services.byname
map
will contain entries differing from those in the local
services
file; it will ...
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