From owner-freebsd-isp Mon Apr 21 06:29:15 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id GAA13042 for isp-outgoing; Mon, 21 Apr 1997 06:29:15 -0700 (PDT) Received: from maelstrom.cc.mcgill.ca (maelstrom.CC.McGill.CA [132.206.35.2]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA13034; Mon, 21 Apr 1997 06:29:12 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from yves@localhost) by maelstrom.cc.mcgill.ca (8.8.5/8.8.5) id JAA07167; Mon, 21 Apr 1997 09:28:53 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <199704211328.JAA07167@maelstrom.cc.mcgill.ca> MIME-Version: 1.0 (NeXT Mail 3.3 v118.2) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Received: by NeXT.Mailer (1.118.2) From: Yves Lepage Date: Mon, 21 Apr 97 09:28:51 -0400 To: Alex Belits Subject: Re: Need a common passwd file among machines cc: Vinay Bannai , freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Reply-To: yves@CC.McGill.CA References: Sender: owner-isp@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Hello, > P.S. Is there any existing thing or at least an idea of making one that > does this thing nicer? NIS is based on rather dumb idea that to > authenticate local user one will want to go to some server and ask him > instead of IMHO more sane approach of distributing authentication > information from that server to always perform authentication locally and > never depend on some host being accessible at the time of user's login. > > In surface this is right. However, NIS does database lookups instead of sequential file access (non-FreeBSD systems) and that's one of the better reasons of existence of NIS. With a few thousands of users, sequential search becomes rather heavy. IMO, NIS is fine, given you have reliable networks and reliable servers and at least one slave. What I don't like about NIS is that in 1997, it still doesn't allow for atomic modifications of the database (add one user, etc...). Regards, Yves