28 lines
1.5 KiB
Plaintext
28 lines
1.5 KiB
Plaintext
NIS Explained
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by Virtual Circuit and Psychotic
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NIS or Network Information Systems is a concept of unix that users need to
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learn. NIS used to be called the "Yellow Pages" until somebody pointed out
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that it was the trademark of the phone company.
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When a company has to many workstations the best way to set them up is to
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have them connect and share files by means of NFS. Then you should give
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access to the machines to your users so that they will have one large
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system. Keeping all the workstations' administrative information organized
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is a small problem. A password file was given to each individual system in
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order to list the users and a set of mount points or directories. In 50
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workstations, when the system added a new users those user had to be added
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to 50 seperate password files, etc. The only way to ease this problem was
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to use NIS. It puts nearly all of the administrative information in one
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place that is roganized by NIS. It makes all the availlable workstation
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accessable by each of the new users. This works out very well. After the
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administrator updates the master files the database can get clumsy and out
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of sync. This is usually caused by the admin regenerating the NIS database
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and accidently making a mistake.The design of NIS makes it possible to
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create security holes. The computers are accesible to only a small group of
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users but it makes it easy for one of the million internet hackers to break
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in.
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You work from here. I'll update this text later with more info on this
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system setup.
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