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TheNetwork Information Service, orNIS (originally calledYellow Pages orYP), is aclient–serverdirectory serviceprotocol fordistributingsystem configuration data such asuser andhost names betweencomputers on acomputer network.Sun Microsystems developed the NIS; the technology islicensed to virtually all otherUnix vendors.
BecauseBritish Telecom PLC owned the name "Yellow Pages" as a registeredtrademark in theUnited Kingdom for its paper-based, commercialtelephone directory, Sun changed the name of its system to NIS, though all the commands and functions still start with "yp".[1]
A NIS/YP system maintains and distributes a central directory of user and group information, hostnames, e-mail aliases and other text-based tables of information in a computer network. For example, in a commonUNIX environment, the list of users foridentification is placed in/etc/passwd and secretauthenticationhashes in/etc/shadow. NIS adds another "global" user list which is used for identifying users on anyclient of the NIS domain.
Administrators have the ability to configure NIS to serve password data to outside processes to authenticate users using various versions of the Unixcrypt(3) hash algorithms. However, in such cases, any NIS(0307) client can retrieve the entire password database for offline inspection.
The original NIS design was seen to have inherent limitations, especially in the areas of scalability and security, so other technologies have come to replace it.
Sun introducedNIS+ as part ofSolaris 2 in 1992, with the intention for it to eventually supersede NIS. NIS+ features much stronger security and authentication features, as well as a hierarchical design intended to provide greater scalability and flexibility. However, it was also more cumbersome to set up and administer, and was more difficult to integrate into an existing NIS environment than many existing users wished.NIS+ was removed from Solaris 11.[2]
As a result, many users choose to remain with NIS, and over time other modern and secure distributed directory systems, most notablyLightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), came to replace it. For example,slapd (the standalone LDAPdaemon) generally runs as a non-root user, andSASL-based encryption of LDAP traffic is natively supported.
On largeLANs,DNS servers may provide betternameserver functionality than NIS or LDAP can provide, leaving just site-wide identification information for NIS master and slave systems to serve. However, some functions—such as the distribution of netmask information to clients, as well as the maintenance of e-mail aliases—may still be performed by NIS or LDAP. NIS maintains anNFS database information file as well as so called maps.
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