NFS Services Administrator's Guide

Configuring and Administering NIS+
Overview of NIS+
Chapter 5210
NIS Compatibility Mode
An NIS+ server may serve NIS clients, by running in NIS
compatibility mode. NIS compatibility mode is intended as a
migration tool, to allow you to migrate your servers from NIS to NIS+
without having to migrate all your clients to NIS+ at the same time.
NIS compatibility mode has the following disadvantages:
• NIS compatibility mode is less secure than regular mode. NIS clients
cannot be authenticated by NIS+, so NIS compatibility mode allows
unauthenticated clients to read the passwd table.
• If you have links or concatenation paths in NIS+ tables, NIS clients
will not be able to follow them.
• NIS clients may read information only in their default domain. They
cannot read information in other domains in the namespace.
• Every NIS client must have a server on its local subnet, unless its
server name has been set with the ypset command.
If any server in an NIS+ domain is running in NIS compatibility mode,
all servers for that domain must run in NIS compatibility mode.
All servers in an NIS+ domain must be NIS+ servers. You cannot mix
NIS servers and NIS+ servers in the same domain.