[COLUG] shout out to Solaris Gurus

[Drew]

Hey,

I know this is a little off topic, but I'm so confused.  Maybe I'm 
missing something.  So in the Solaris installation it asks you what you 
want to use for name resolution NIS, NIS+, DNS etc...  I am reading up 
on (Solaris and) nfs right now.  I was reading about how NIS  can do 
this as well, and how alledgedly it can do some LDAP type stuff.

My question is what exactly IS NIS?  Is it Sun's swiss army knife 
(somthing akin to linux' inetd), or is it a suite of applications? 
What's it supposed to do?  How widely is it implemented (Basically 
trying to discern how familiar I should become with it).  Does anyone 
know how familiar you have to be to be SUN certified?

Thanks;