[COLUG] shout out to Solaris Gurus

[Ethan Dicks]

On 6/15/07, Drew <saphetiger at post891.org> wrote:
> 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.

Heh... I'd prefer to describe it as LDAP does some NIS-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?

NIS is, AFAIK, the trademark-sanitized name for 'yp' or "yellow
pages".  It's been around for well over 20 years.

http://www.tech-faq.com/nis-yp.shtml

and

http://www.sun3zoo.de/en/yp.html

I think I first encountered yp (NIS) on a MicroVAX running Ultrix
(DEC-badged BSD UNIX) around 1985.  We didn't have a TCP/IP network,
so we didn't bother with yp.

> What's it supposed to do?

Provide distributed directory services - i.e., contents of /etc/passwd
shared across the network.

> How widely is it implemented

Anymore?  No idea.  It was popular 10 years ago.  The last time _I_
saw it in the "real world" was 2004 (that site is now running LDAP).

> (Basically
> trying to discern how familiar I should become with it).  Does anyone
> know how familiar you have to be to be SUN certified?

I don't know anything about what Sun thinks anyone should know.  If
they haven't re-written their tests in five years, it'll probably be
on there.

-ethan