NIS, LDAP Which one is best?

[bravo911]

note** It has come to my attention that NIS+ is a pipedream and should be ignored, however now the concept of using LDAP has arisen. See the bottom of the forum to see the current status.

I have a small home network (8 boxes) and currently, I have to create separate users on each machine, now I would like to have something similar to the Windows Domain Controller where users are managed centrally on the server, and those changes carry through across the network intantly. Now from what I can tell, the proper tool for such a task is either NIS, or NIS+... now the thing is that I know absolutely nothing regarding this in the world of linux... I do however have a great deal of experience working with Windows NT domains via Samba as well as using a Naitive Domain Controller. I have taken a look at the howto regarding this, but for some reason I havent been able to make things work, and honestly, the howto really made the differences between the two fuzzier... Now i'm all confused as to which would suit me best so I'm looking for some experienced opinions. All of these machines are running gentoo so that should make the setup slightly easier. If there is a better way to achieve this, please let me know!

In the end, I would like to be able to share out the /home dir on the server and thus create the linux equivalent to roaming profiles. What would be the best settings for this in the /etc/exports file?

Thanks for your help!

[Tazok]

[tuxmin]

Hi,

the main difference between NIS and NIS+ is security related. NIS is totally unencrypted i.e. passwords travel in plain text through your network. This might not be a problem for you if your net is used by trusted users.
However, there is no NIS+ server available for Linux. You definitely need Solaris to run the server, although the Linux client is fully implemented (see http://www.linux-nis.org/ for details)
I used NIS+/NIS for many years and both work quiet well. Especially NIS is easy to set up (in crontrast to NIS+ which can be a nightmare to administrate on the server side).
As NIS supports automount maps you can easily distribute your /home dirs via NFS.
I suggest you start setting up the server according to the link I gave you above. I never did on a Gentoo system, but
the ebuilds ypserv, ypbind and yp-tools should provide you with all you need.
After configuring your your /etc/passwd, /etc/group etc. make sure to call "make" in /var/yp/. That's the point where you NIS maps actually get built!

Hth, Alex!!!
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[bravo911]

Thanks for clearing this up... now it looks like the more appropriate decision is 'do I use nis or LDAP?'. I see there is a howto on the gentoo docs page regarding the use of LDAP... Which would be best suited to my needs?