Is NIS okay for a centralized working environment?

saagar · 01-18-2010, 05:53 PM

Friends,
I am working for a web hosting company. We work in red hat linux environment and the employees at present are having their data stored in individual systems. We wish to have a centralized environment, so that users can log in to a server with their user names irrespective of the systems they will set. Also, this could facilitate
easy backup. we have about 70 systems, 90% linux machines. The number will grow in future.
I am good in NIS, but not at all with LDAP. Is it okay if I suggest NIS?
thanks

kenneho · 01-19-2010, 12:34 AM

Hi.

I have close to none experience with NIS, but from what I've read NIS is a very old technology with have been replaced by LDAP. I guess NIS still works, but I would (strongly) suggest that you get to know LDAP before making any decision about running NIS.

- kenneho

chrism01 · 01-19-2010, 05:56 PM

See here for really good NIS & LDAP HOWTOs(http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/), but the fundamental issue is security. NIS security is minimal, including all transmissions in plaintext. If you want secure, use LDAP with TLS.
Interestingly, the RHEL Deployment guide http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red...loyment_Guide/ has a whole chapter on LDAP HOWTO, but very little on NIS ...