NIS+ (Network Information Service Plus) Administration

NIS+ is a networking service that centrally manages information about network users and the machines they use and access, applications that are run, file systems that are used, and services that are needed to do all of these things. This type of setup is very useful if you have a network with users who share a large portion of their files and applications. It also makes the job of the network administrator easier, since NIS+ is the official repository of networking information. NIS+ provides a robust network security and authorization environment for file sharing services such as NFS, discussed a little later in this chapter.

NIS, the predecessor of NIS+, has been around for a while. Commonly called the Yellow Pages, or YP for short, NIS was introduced by Sun Microsystems in the 1980s as a method for managing NFS environments by controlling and sharing such things as password and group information among hosts in a network. NIS+, which is part of Sun Microsystem’s suite of services called the Open Network Computing Plus (ONC+) platform, has been built onto the NIS platform.

NIS+ provides a screening mechanism that authenticates users when a request is made for a resource that is shared on the network. For instance, if you want to use a file on another machine in the network, NIS+ determines whether or not you are allowed to use the resource before allowing NFS (see the following section) to mount it. If you want to perform a command on another networked machine using RPC (Remote Procedure Calls), NIS+ validates that you have access to the command as well as the information on the networked machine. If you are validated, you can perform commands such as rsh on the remote machine. (See later on in this chapter for a discussion of RPC.)

NIS does not do authentication; it merely returns database entries. In the case of a password database, it is up to the application to determine whether the requesting user has the privileges to access it.

NIS+ is implemented on the UNIX system by a daemon called rpc.nisd. This daemon starts the NIS+ service in one of two ways. The first is to run NIS+ with all of its service features. If you start the daemon with the –YB option, NIS+ is started in NIS compatibility mode. This allows machines that are on the network to use resources as though they are being managed by the older NIS services.