What are NIS and NIS+?
The Network Information Service (NIS) provides a simple network lookup service consisting of databases and processes. It was formerly known as Sun Yellow Pages (YP). The name had to be changed when British Telecom claimed to have the copyright of this term, and so it became NIS. The functionality of the two remains the same; only the name has changed. Its purpose is to provide information, that has to be known throughout the network, to all machines on the network. Information likely to be distributed by NIS is: • login names/passwords/home directories (/etc/passwd) • group information (/etc/group) • host names and IP numbers (/etc/hosts) So, for example, if your password entry is recorded in the NIS passwd database, you will be able to login on all machines on the net which have the NIS client programs running. NIS+ (Network Information Service Plus) was introduced by Sun Microsystems with the Solaris 2.x OS. It is compatible with NIS, but has a lot of additional features. With NIS+ i
