LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Objective 2: NIS Configuration

NIS is Sun's Network Information Service. It was formerly known as Yellow Pages, but after a trademark dispute with British Telecom, Sun changed the name to Network Information Service. The history of Yellow Pages is why many NIS-related commands begin with yp.

NIS is a simple directory service whose main purpose is to allow remote authentication for systems on local network systems. NIS allows information such as passwd and group files, sendmail aliases, automount maps, and hosts files to be kept on a central server. Each system in the NIS domain runs the NIS client, ypbind, to find a server and retrieve the appropriate maps from it.

NIS uses a master/slave server configuration that resembles DNS. The master NIS server holds the NIS map files. Changes to the maps are then pushed to any slave servers. While an NIS domain can operate with only one server, it is best to have at least one slave server for redundancy.

You must run the RPC portmapper (/usr/sbin/portmap) to run NIS . The RPC portmapper servers convert the RPC program numbering to TCP/IP or UDP/IP protocol port numbers.

Most Linux distributions ship with NIS Version 2. NIS Version 3 is known as NIS+ and is not in widespread use.

Before setting up servers or clients, you must decide on a domain name for your NIS setup. The domain is used to ensure that you're talking to the right NIS servers . This domain name has nothing to do with DNS, your DNS domain name, or your hostnames. Most directory ...