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The goal of the NIS+ naming service is to
allow centralization of network administration. The administration of
a group of machines grows in complexity with the number of machines
and users to manage. Thus, decentralized administration is conceivable
for two or three machines, it becomes more complex if the number
exceeds that limit. For example, imagine a group of five machines. If
all the users have to be able to login as themselves on each machine,
the administrator must duplicate the /etc/passwd on every machine.
Although putting this in place initially is possible, maintenance
becomes difficult. In effect, each modification of one element of the
password file makes it necessary to reproduce the change on each
machine. The problem that is raised by the /etc/password file is
exponentially increased by necessary changes to many other
administrative files, such as the groups and hosts files. Centralized
Administration It is advisable for administrators to set up networks
with a centralized administration that distributes a database to all
the machines known by the distributed administration. This database
can be centralized on one server, which provides the administrative
services. The group of machines using the database on the server is
called a domain. This centralized administration uses a naming service
as the framework for the domain(s). NIS (Network Information Service)
and NIS+ are two naming services that can be set up for use in the
Solaris networked environment. The Figure shows a NIS+ server
providing naming services to client on the network
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