is nis a service so users can log onto there same user account on different machines. and have there same home dir etc on each one ? if so then does anyone know where i can get information on how to get it, use it etc. because i have never tried it atall. if that is not what NIS is then does anyone know what i am talking about and what it is im looking for.

like how novell works. only example i could think off! as i am totally new to this field of networking but i really want to learn how it works

thanks in advance, ben

NIS - Howto


Oh, and btw, it's their, as in "a possessive pronoun",
not there ...


Cheers,
Tink

cheers tink, you have helped me out loads now and i really apricate it even though im not going to be reading that now it is exactly what i was looking for so thanks

I'm not quite sure whether the 3rd post here was meant to be sarcastic or just confusing, but tink was merely pointing out that the original post may have been open to misunderstanding due to spelling. That aside, let's continue....

NIS (Network Information System) is a client-server system for making information on one computer available on others - check out http://www.linux-nis.org/. You set up one computer as a master server with all the user account, group and home directory information, and it makes this available on a network (by running a program called ypserv). You then configure the clients to consult the server when they're looking for this information (they need to run ypbind). You can also set up additional slave servers that get their information from the master, so that if the master is unavailable the NIS remains up.

NIS doesn't however solve the "access to home directories" problem - for that you need NFS (Network File System). You tell a host on your network to export some of its directories to a local netgroup, and all the other hosts in that netgroup can mount those directories just as if they were on a local hard drive.

Another useful application for these purposes is autofs. This reduces the network load by dynamically mounting a network file system - so only when somebody logs on as joeuser will the directory /home/joeuser be mounted on their computer.

R.

the 3rd post was ment to be neither im just not a good speller etc. im dyslexic, anyway. the reason i want to setup NIS is because i have been using novell at college (netware server 6 & netware client4.9) and i think the way it works. e.g. you create users on the server that can log into any machine with the client software installed and access there home dir etc. (i think roaming accounts as windows calls them, but better). i was wondering what the equlivant was on unix, and i think that NIS is what im looking for .
i use samba for shares, is NFS better?
i want to be able to setup login scripts etc to mount directories when the user logs in. but i want to set this up so it works for unix & windows machines because i run a gentoo/win2k dual boot and i have another machine on my network which is just windows xp (oh and a server of course )

when you say "netgroup" is that a workgroup ?

Also that autofs thing, is that actual a program and if so does it get installed on the client machines or the server? or is it an option to go in fstab ?

thanks for the help people

Better is the wrong word ... more appropriate, and
slightly faster :) Samba will give you more fine-grained
control. One of the things is that with NFS you have to
be very careful with permissions (you should make sure
that root is squashed) and that only certain machines are
allowed to access the NFS shares (have a good look at
/etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny)

I haven't used NFS for Windows, but the last time
I read about it the common statement was that it
doesn't perform quite as well. So, if you want to
use both winDOHs and Linux as a client stick
with Samba.

It's both a kernel and user-space thing that gets
configured via fstab :)

Have a look at the entries you get from
man -k autofs


Cheers,
Tink

tink ur a ledgend! thanks.