SUMMARY: NIS for Solaris?

From: Damon LaCaille (Damon_LaCaille@dgii.com)
Date: Thu Apr 29 1999 - 14:44:38 CDT


Holy cow!!! (No offense to any religious organizations meant)

I don't think I've ever received this many responses, and a lot of them came to me before my original post got back to me! My original question is listed at the end of this message.

Here are the facts:

1) Solaris 2.5.1 and earlier come with NSKit1.2 (NIS Server) on a Server supplement CD. You must install it separately from the regular OS install. However, the NIS client comes automatically installed on these versions.

2) Solaris 2.6 and 7 come with NIS server bundled in.

3) NIS+ is generally regarded as a beast to administer, even though it adds better security and scaleability.

4) Linux has both an NIS client and an NIS+ client available. In fact several people mention that they have several Unix variants which all clients of a Solaris NIS server, complete with automounter home directories.

5) Most folks lean towards NIS because it is easier to administer, there is more support for it on multiple operating systems and there are several programs that can make use of it better than NIS+ (such as Apache authentication modules, etc)

As far as LDAP was concerned, the general feeling is that LDAP will be the wave of the future, but for now, and for probably several years to come, NIS will be the mainstay of administration tools for Sun and several other Unix boxes because of it's widespread use, it's ease of administration and it's huge level of support.

We've decided to go with NIS now that we know Solaris 2.5.1/2.6/7 can serve as an NIS server. I want to thank all of the following people who were terrific with responding with great information!

Lolly Brown, Marco Greene, Michael Cunningham, Danny Johnson, Gustavo Chaves, Olivier Giraud, Brooke King, Michael Maciolek, "garret", David Blaine, Sam Vilain, Somesh Nagthan, Matthew Fansher, David LeBlanc, Harry Levinson, Eugene Choi, Peter Wargo, Matthew Stier, Stefan Voss, Bertrand Hutin, "anders", Rick Robino, Richard Skelton, Ray Delaney, Gary Franczyk.

I believe I got everybody there. As you can see with so many responses it was hard to respond to everybody in turn, so once I again, I'd just like to say "THANK YOU!" to each and every one of you for responding so quickly and with such great information.

Damon

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Hello again gurus,
  My problem of the day is... We currently have Solaris 2.4 through Solaris 7 running on all of our Sun boxes, however we will be getting some Linux boxes in the near future that we would like to use as file servers, print servers, etc but we'd like to use user administration functions on the Sun boxes. However, I don't think Linux supports NIS+, and I don't think we have regular NIS on the Solaris boxes. The Solaris (2.5.1 and up at least) all have the YP client daemons, but no server daemons such as ypserv, etc.
  Is there a solution to this issue? How do other companies handle single sign on for multiple Unix platforms?
  This is definitely a Sun-related question because we may be implementing NIS/NIS+ on several servers.
  Also, what is your opinion on NIS/NIS+ being outdated, and perhaps we should use LDAP for logins, etc? I've heard mixed reports about this as well.
  So if you have any information on running NIS on Solaris, or NIS+ on Linux, please, I would love to hear from you!

Thanks so much
Damon

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