Network Information Service
| Company type | Subsidiary (at time of NIS creation) |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer software |
| Founded | February 24, 1982 in Santa Clara, California, United States |
| Founder | Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy |
| Headquarters | Santa Clara, California , United States |
| Products | Network Information Service (NIS), among others |
The Network Information Service (NIS), initially known as Yellow Pages (YP), is a client–server directory service protocol created by Sun Microsystems to distribute system configuration details such as user accounts and host names across computer networks. This technology has been licensed to the majority of other Unix system providers.
Because the term "Yellow Pages" is trademarked by British Telecom PLC in the UK, Sun Microsystems rebranded the system as NIS, although command-line utilities continue to use the "yp" prefix.
NIS centralizes and disseminates directory information including user and group records, hostnames, e-mail aliases, and various text-based tables within a network. In standard UNIX setups, user data is stored in while password hashes reside in ; NIS supplements these by providing a unified user database accessible from any client within the NIS domain.
System administrators have the option to configure NIS to distribute password information for authentication purposes using Unix crypt(3) hashes. This approach, however, exposes the entire password database to all NIS clients, creating potential security vulnerabilities.
Successor technologies
Due to constraints in scalability and security, NIS was succeeded by more advanced solutions.
In 1992, Sun introduced NIS+ alongside Solaris 2 as an enhanced replacement for NIS. Offering improved security features, authentication mechanisms, and a hierarchical structure designed for better scalability and adaptability, NIS+ was nonetheless complex to implement and integrate. Support for NIS+ was discontinued starting with Solaris 11.
As a result, many organizations continued using NIS while more secure directory services like the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) gained traction. LDAP servers such as slapd operate under non-privileged accounts and support native encryption methods via SASL.
Within extensive LAN environments, the DNS often delivers superior nameserver capabilities compared to NIS or LDAP, restricting NIS’s function primarily to network-wide identification data. Nonetheless, both NIS and LDAP may still be employed for tasks like distributing netmask settings and managing e-mail aliases. Additionally, NIS handles an NFS database file along with multiple associated maps.
See also
- Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)
- Hesiod (name service)
- Name Service Switch (NSS)
- Network information system, broader application of NIS in system and network administration
External links
- The Linux NIS(YP)/NYS/NIS+ HOWTO – Linux Documentation Project
- Distributed Authentication System (DAS) Handbook – Van Emery
- NFS and NIS Security – Symantec
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6: Securing NIS – Red Hat
- Yellow Pages, part 1 – Frédéric Raynal, ibiblio
- RHEL 9 will remove support for NIS – Alexander Bokovoy, Sr. Principal Software Engineer