Hi,

I have just heard that LDAP/Kerberos could be an alternative to NIS.
Which is more secure?
Is LDAP/Kerberos more difficult to implement than NIS?

elbe

Elbe3321 -

We used to run NIS in my department, until 1 of our user accounts was compromised... With nis it is possible for 1 client to grab the entire yppasswd file including password hashes. Once this guy had 1 account, he was able to run a md5 cracker and get the password of all 400 users... We ended up randomly generating password for everyone as well as replacing our server (SuckIT was installed). This was a huge nightmare... In addition to being able to grab the passwd file containg the hashes, ypbind sends passwords in clear text - def. a HUGE security risk this day in age... They revised nis to NIS+ which actually encrypts data between clients, but i've still heard bad things aboiut it - I would recommend ldap/kerberos over nis... we are still in the process of implementing ldap to replace our once nis network


-Chris

NIS+ solves most of the above problems mentioned, as for weak passwords, they can't be avoided, some sales droid is always going to use something stupid like "password" which can be brute forced. With that said LDAP is still the way to go ! It is much more versatile and is truly multi use. Your dir can be integrated into a windows AD as well as be a mail/contact dir, and server to auth and provided resource locations to your *NIX boxen.

A note though, setting up LDAP/Kerb is not for the faint of heart, im not saying you can't do it just give your self some time. Bellow are some links I picked up allong the way.

http://www.padl.com/Contents/OpenSourceSoftware.html

http://diradmin.open-it.org/