“This is a step-by-step account of the method I used recently to install and configure a NIS master and slaves on servers running Solaris 8. The steps detailed should work fine on other versions of Solaris, but as I have not explicitly tested other versions (except as clients) you may encounter issues. The clients used with this setup ranged from Solaris 7 to Solaris 10. The installation was in a medium-sized Solaris-only farm (100+ hosts).”
NIS has been dead for years.
what is the alternative(s)?
I believe LDAP is the more modern way of doing things.
You achieve the same with pam_ldap, nss_ldap and directories filled with posixAccounts, posixGroups and so forth. (But more dated OS-es don’t allow all this, for instance with a mixed FreeBSD 4 and 6 environment I still had to use NIS before phasing out 4…)
Maybe you haven’t seen a new NIS network for a few years but that doesn’t mean that NIS is dead. There are many NIS networks out there.
But if you read TFA, you would have noticed that the author also recommended migrating to another directory services solution, particularly OpenLDAP. The customer, however, was satisifed with NIS and just wanted an update to a more recent version to solve some security issues. That’s why.
Actually in some ways kerberos is friendlier for “shadow” data than nis is, besides it being more secure… Not much wrong with using NIS for things _besides_ password hashes, private keys, and stuff though: http://www.vanemery.com/DAS/DAS-manual.html