NFS Services Administrator's Guide

Configuring and Administering NIS+
Overview of NIS+
Chapter 5 201
Overview of NIS+
NIS+ allows you to maintain configuration information for many hosts in
a set of distributed databases. You can read or modify these databases
from any host in the network, if you have the proper credentials and
access permissions. Common configuration information, which would
have to be maintained separately on each host in a network without
NIS+, can be stored and maintained in a single location and propagated
to all of the hosts in the network.
Advantages of NIS+ over NIS
NIS+ has the following advantages over NIS:
• NIS+ supports a hierarchical domain structure called the NIS+
namespace. You can create a separate domain for each workgroup
or department in your organization. Each domain can be managed
independently of the others. Hosts in any domain may have access to
information in all the other domains in the namespace.
• The NIS+ namespace can grow with your organization. Because
information may be distributed over multiple domains, each with its
own servers, the size of the NIS+ namespace is not limited by the
capacity of any single server.
• NIS+ is not limited by subnet boundaries. NIS+ clients do not
broadcast requests, so you do not need a server on every subnet.
• NIS+ is secure. It uses a private key/public key authentication
scheme with DES encryption. Every user and host in the namespace
has its own unique credentials, and you can decide which users and
hosts will be allowed to read or modify the information in each NIS+
domain.
• You can modify the information in an NIS+ table from any host in
the namespace. Modifications are made directly to the NIS+ table, so
you do not have to rebuild the table from a file.
• Replica servers in NIS+ domains receive each table update as it is
made. You do not have to push whole tables to the replica servers.
• An NIS+ table may contain many columns, and you can search for
entries based on the information in any column.