More and more, Linux machines are installed as part of a network of computers. To simplify network administration, most networks (mostly Sun-based networks) run the Network Information Service. Linux machines can take full advantage of existing NIS service or provide NIS service themselves. It can also (with the NYS library) act as a limited NIS+ client.
This document tries to answer questions about setting up NIS(YP) on your Linux machine. It does not talk about how to set up NIS+. Don't forget to read section 5.1, The RPC Portmapper.
New versions of this document will be posted periodically (about every
month) to the newsgroups comp.os.linux.announce and comp.os.linux.misc.
The document is archived on a number of Linux FTP sites, including
sunsite.unc.edu in /pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO.
Although this document has been put together to the best of our knowledge it may, and probably does contain errors. Please read any README files that are bundled with any of the various pieces of software described in this document for more detailed and accurate information. We will attempt to keep this document as error free as possible.
If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please email
them to Erwin Embsen <erwin@nioz.nl>. Definitely contact
him if you find errors or obvious omissions.
We would like to thank all the people who have contributed (directly or indirectly) to this document. In alphabetical order:
Andrea Dell'Amico <adellam@di.unipi.it>
Mitchum DSouza <Mitch.Dsouza@Dubai.Sun.COM>
Erwin Embsen <erwin@nioz.nl>
Byron A Jeff <byron@cc.gatech.edu>
Peter Eriksson <pen@lysator.liu.se>
Theo de Raadt <deraadt@fsa.ca> is responsible for the original yp-clients code. Swen Thuemmler <swen@uni-paderborn.de> ported the yp-clients code to Linux and also ported the yp-routines in libc (again based on Theo's work).