NIS or Network Information Service is a directory service protocol for distributing system configuration data such as user and host names between computers on a computer network.
Wiki:
NIS stands for Network Information Service, (originally called Yellow Pages or YP) is a client–server directory service protocol for distributing system configuration data such as user and host names between computers on a computer network.
A NIS/YP system maintains and distributes a central directory of user and group information, hostnames, e-mail aliases and other text-based tables of information in a computer network.
Example:
In a common UNIX environment, the list of users for identification is placed in /etc/passwd, and secret authentication hashes in /etc/shadow. NIS then adds another “global” user list which is used for identifying users on any client of the NIS domain.
Administrators have the ability to configure NIS to serve password data to outside processes to authenticate users using various versions of the Unix crypt hash algorithms. However in such cases, any NIS client can retrieve the entire password database for offline inspection.
Usage:
The tag nis should be used for programming related problems of Network Information Service, Please note that problems related to NIS server installation and configuration should be asked at https://serverfault.com/ .
