"Steven T. Hatton" <hattons@speakeasy.net> writes:
I /believe/ yp is actually NIS+.
YP stands for Yellow Pages, the name which Sun originally used for its naming service. British Telecom protested (I think it was its trademark) and therefore Sun renamed it to NIS. In NIS+, Sun added security and hierarchical domains but, technically, NIS+ is very different from NIS. A similar name is used for marketing purposes only. Other Unix vendors refused to support NIS+ and therefore it is a dead technology now though some companies may still use it. Anyway, both NIS and NIS+ are strongly OBSOLETE at present. There are several good reasons why NIS is still used but the future is somewhere else, probably in LDAP. Unfortunately, administration tools for configuring and managing LDAP on Linux are still not user friendly. I expect it will change in 2004.
I do recall reading so sun documentation on NIS+/NFS and encryption, but that was back in the 20th century.
NFS is terribly insecure and therefore Sun came with Secure NFS (long time ago). Some Unixes implement it but the widespread is low. I'm not aware of any supported implementation of Secure NFS in Linux. IMHO there is no conceptually similar alternative to NFS which is secure, fully supported, and easy to install and configure now. Solutions like Coda, Samba, AFS, GPFS from IBM, ... exist and work but they are based on different concepts. NFS is still actively supported by Sun so I hope some security will finally be added, perhaps via IPv6. Personally, my level of satisfaction with naming services and network file system in Linux is very low. (But it doesn't mean it's better in other operating systems.) -- A.M.