On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, Matt Johnson wrote:
Not an answer, but a question:What is the difference (advantages, disadvantages, and purpose) of LDAP when compared to NIS, or are the things for different jobs? Which is better, and why? Or have I misunderstood. Where does Kerberos fit in?As you can tell, I've run a Linux server for Windows clients, but never actually pieced together a Linux network of scale.
NIS is annoyingly dead - very little development work seems to take place on it. This is one major drawback. LDAP is somewhat more comprehensive than NIS: an LDAP directory can contain information such as phone numbers and concepts of departments or other groupings. LDAP can be used as a source for e-mail address books. LDAP stores the user information; Kerberos deals with password verification. (This is a huge over-simplification.) Kerberos allows for single sign-on in a network of mutually suspicious users and computers via the use of a trusted third party. Win2K uses LDAP and Kerberos, and this is one of the areas in which I think MS have made a good decision (although I deplore the "embrace and extend" approach they are applying to Kerberos). HTH, Michael