I have some workstations that are configured to recieve 500 pages of NIS data from the NIS server. This data includes the usual files, but mostly consists of configuration files for a software tool.
So this seems pretty strange to me. I was wondering why they didn't use NFS instead of NIS. If I used NFS, I could just mount up the configuration files and wouldn't have to worry about pushing the maps all over the network.
Any thoughts on when to use NIS and when to use NFS?
NIS stands for Network Information Service which was previously called Sun Yellow Pages (YP).
It provides distributed service to simplify administration work in a networked computing environment.
The idea is that instead of having every machine keep its own copy of administrative files,
these files are maintained on a machine called NIS server.
Client machines have to ask the server for its administrative files.
System administrators use NIS to keep a centralized database of system administration files,
such as /etc/passwd, /etc/group and /etc/hosts. As a result, every machine has the same set of
administration files. For better efficiency, these files or maps are stored in a database format instead
of plain text.
NFS ( Network File System) is a TCP/IP application
that has since been implemented on most DOS and Unix systems.
NFS lets you graft remote filesystems - or portions of them - onto your local namespace.
Directories on the remote systems appear as part of your local filesystem and all the utilities
you use for listing and managing files (e.g. ls, cp, mv) operate on the remote files exactly as they
do on your local files.
What is the best for you depends on your environment, apps, etc