Network Information Service

The Network Information Service, or NIS (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. Sun Microsystems developed the NIS; the technology is licensed to virtually all other Unix vendors.

Because British Telecom PLC owned the name "Yellow Pages" as a registered trademark in the United Kingdom for its paper-based, commercial telephone directory, Sun changed the name of its system to NIS, though all the commands and functions still start with “yp”.

An 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. For 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 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(3) hash algorithms. However in such cases, any NIS client can retrieve the entire password database for offline inspection. Kerberos was designed to handle authentication in a more secure manner.

Read more about Network Information Service:  Successor Technologies

Famous quotes containing the words network, information and/or service:

    Parents need all the help they can get. The strongest as well as the most fragile family requires a vital network of social supports.
    Bernice Weissbourd (20th century)

    When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
    Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)

    Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)