Date: Mon, 21 Apr 97 09:28:51 -0400 From: Yves Lepage <yves@CC.McGill.CA> To: Alex Belits <abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us> Cc: Vinay Bannai <vinay@agni.nuko.com>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Need a common passwd file among machines Message-ID: <199704211328.JAA07167@maelstrom.cc.mcgill.ca> References: <Pine.LNX.3.95.970419224831.834C-100000@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us>
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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
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