Managing NFS and NIS, 2nd Edition

Preface

Twenty years ago, most computer centers had a few large computers shared by several hundred users. The “computing environment” was usually a room containing dozens of terminals. All users worked in the same place, with one set of disks, one user account information file, and one view of all resources. Today, local area networks have made terminal rooms much less common. Now, a “computing environment” almost always refers to distributed computing, where users have personal desktop machines, and shared resources are provided by special-purpose systems such as file, computer, and print servers. Each desktop requires redundant configuration files, including user information, network host addresses, and local and shared remote filesystem information.

A mechanism to provide consistent access to all files and configuration information ensures that all users have access to the “right” machines, and that once they have logged in they will see a set of files that is both familiar and complete. This consistency must be provided in a way that is transparent to the users; that is, a user should not know that a filesystem is located on a remote fileserver. The transparent view of resources must be consistent across all machines and also consistent with the way things work in a non-networked environment. In a networked computing environment, it’s usually up to the system administrator to manage the machines on the network (including centralized servers) as well as the network itself. Managing ...