Successor Technologies
The original NIS design was seen to have inherent limitations, especially in the areas of scalability and security, so other technologies have come to replace it.
Sun introduced NIS+ as part of Solaris 2 in 1992, with the intention for it to eventually supersede NIS. NIS+ features much stronger security and authentication features, as well as a hierarchical design intended to provide greater scalability and flexibility. However, it was also more cumbersome to set up and administer, and was more difficult to integrate into an existing NIS environment than many existing users wished.
As a result, many users chose to stick with NIS, and over time other modern and secure distributed directory systems, most notably LDAP, came to replace it. For example, slapd (the standalone LDAP daemon) generally runs as a non-root user, and SASL-based encryption of LDAP traffic is natively supported.
On large LANs, DNS servers may provide better nameserver functionality than NIS or LDAP can provide, leaving just site-wide identification information for NIS master and slave systems to serve. However, some functions — such as the distribution of netmask information to clients, as well as the maintenance of e-mail aliases — may still be performed by NIS or LDAP. NIS maintains an NFS database information file as well as so called maps.
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“The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)