16.5 Naming Services and NFS
16.5.2 NIS administration
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