The Network Information Service, or NIS (originally called Yellow Pages or YP), is a client–server

directory service In computing, a directory service or name service maps the names of network resources to their respective network addresses. It is a shared information infrastructure for locating, managing, administering and organizing everyday items and network r ...

protocol Protocol may refer to: Sociology and politics * Protocol (politics), a formal agreement between nation states * Protocol (diplomacy), the etiquette of diplomacy and affairs of state * Etiquette, a code of personal behavior Science and technology ...

for distributing system configuration data such as

user Ancient Egyptian roles * User (ancient Egyptian official), an ancient Egyptian nomarch (governor) of the Eighth Dynasty * Useramen, an ancient Egyptian vizier also called "User" Other uses * User (computing), a person (or software) using an ...

and

host name In computer networking, a hostname (archaically nodename) is a label that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network and that is used to identify the device in various forms of electronic communication, such as the World Wide Web. Ho ...

s between

computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations ( computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These prog ...

s on a

computer network A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...

developed the NIS; the technology is licensed to virtually all other

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...

vendors. Because

British Telecom BT Group plc (trading as BT and formerly British Telecom) is a British multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered in London, England. It has operations in around 180 countries and is the largest provider of fixed-line, b ...

PLC owned the name "

Yellow Pages The yellow pages are telephone directories of businesses, organized by category rather than alphabetically by business name, in which advertising is sold. The directories were originally printed on yellow paper, as opposed to Telephone direct ...

" as a registered

trademark A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a type of intellectual property consisting of a recognizable sign, design, or expression that identifies products or services from a particular source and distinguishes them from ot ...

in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and ...

for its paper-based, commercial

telephone directory A telephone directory, commonly called a telephone book, telephone address book, phonebook, or the white and yellow pages, is a listing of telephone subscribers in a geographical area or subscribers to services provided by the organization that ...

, Sun changed the name of its system to NIS, though all the commands and functions still start with "yp". 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 common

UNIX Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...

environment, the list of users for

identification Identification or identify may refer to: *Identity document, any document used to verify a person's identity Arts, entertainment and media * ''Identify'' (album) by Got7, 2014 * "Identify" (song), by Natalie Imbruglia, 1999 * Identification ( ...

is placed in and secret

authentication Authentication (from ''authentikos'', "real, genuine", from αὐθέντης ''authentes'', "author") is the act of proving an assertion, such as the identity of a computer system user. In contrast with identification, the act of indicatin ...

hashes in . NIS adds another "global" user list which is used for identifying users on any

client Client(s) or The Client may refer to: * Client (business) * Client (computing), hardware or software that accesses a remote service on another computer * Customer or client, a recipient of goods or services in return for monetary or other valuabl ...

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 Unix crypt(3) hash algorithms. However, in such cases, any NIS(0307) client can retrieve the entire password database for offline inspection.

Successor technologies

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 introduced

NIS+ NIS+ is a directory service developed by Sun Microsystems to replace its older 'NIS' (Network Information Service). It is designed to eliminate the need for duplication across many computers of configuration data such as user accounts, host names ...

as part of Solaris 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.

has been removed from Solaris 11. As a result, many users choose to stick with NIS, and over time other modern and secure distributed directory systems, most notably

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP ) is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. Directory servi ...

(LDAP), came to replace it. For example, slapd (the standalone LDAP daemon) generally runs as a non-

root user In computing, the superuser is a special user account used for system administration. Depending on the operating system (OS), the actual name of this account might be root, administrator, admin or supervisor. In some cases, the actual name of th ...

, and SASL-based encryption of LDAP traffic is natively supported. On large

LAN Lan or LAN may also refer to: Science and technology * Local asymptotic normality, a fundamental property of regular models in statistics * Longitude of the ascending node, one of the orbital elements used to specify the orbit of an object in spa ...

s, DNS servers may provide better nameserver functionality than NIS or LDAP can provide, leaving just site-wide identification information for NIS master and slave systems to serve. However, some functionssuch as the distribution of netmask information to clients, as well as the maintenance of e-mail aliasesmay still be performed by NIS or LDAP. NIS maintains an NFS database information file as well as so called maps.

References

External links

* * * * * * RHEL 9 will remove support for NI
Alexander Bokovoy, Sr. Principal Software Engineer slide show
{{Sun Microsystems Unix network-related software Sun Microsystems software Network management Directory services Inter-process communication

Successor technologies

See also

References

External links