NIS Explained
by Virtual Circuit and Psychotic

NIS or Network Information Systems is a concept of unix that users need to learn. NIS used to be called the "Yellow Pages" until somebody pointed out that it was the trademark of the phone company.

When a company has to many workstations the best way to set them up is to have them connect and share files by means of NFS. Then you should give access to the machines to your users so that they will have one large system. Keeping all the workstations' administrative information organized is a small problem.  A password file was given to each individual system in order to list the users and a set of mount points or directories. In 50 workstations, when the system added a new users those user had to be added to 50 seperate password files, etc.  The only way to ease this problem was to use NIS. It puts nearly all of the administrative information in one place that is roganized by NIS.  It makes all the availlable workstation accessable by each of the new users. This works out very well.  After the administrator updates the master files the database can get clumsy and out of sync. This is usually caused by the admin regenerating the NIS database and accidently making a mistake.The design of NIS makes it possible to create security holes. The computers are accesible to only a small group of users but it makes it easy for one of the million internet hackers to break in.

You work from here. I'll update this text later with more info on this system setup.
