Introducing NIS
Developed in 1985 by Sun Microsystems, Network Information Service (NIS), initially known as Yellow Pages (YP), was the first Unix-based naming service. Now that you've read about DNS in Chapter 19, “DNS” you might wonder what the need was for NIS when DNS was already present. Is it just yet another naming service?
NIS was developed independently of DNS and has a different focus than DNS. The idea of NIS is to enable easier network management by storing information about machine names, users, network, and network services in a centralized location. This also enables a strong central authentication mechanism for your network. On the other hand, DNS is a distributed system and focuses on making communication simpler by mapping hostnames ...
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