Managing NFS and NIS, 2nd Edition.

by Hal Stern, Mike Eisler and Ricardo Labiaga
ISBN: 1-56592-510-6
Second edition, published June 2001.

The Network Information Service (NIS) and Network File System (NFS) are services that allow you to build distributed computing systems that are both consistent in their appearance and transparent in the way files and data are shared.

NIS provides a distributed database system for common configuration files. NIS servers manage copies of the database files, and NIS clients request information from the servers instead of using their own, local copies of these files. For example, the /etc/hosts file is managed by NIS. A few NIS servers manage copies of the information in the hosts file, and all NIS clients ask these servers for host address information instead of looking in their own/etc/hosts file. Once NIS is running, it is no longer necessary to manage every /etc/hosts file on every machine in the network -- simply updating the NIS servers ensures that all machines will be able to retrieve the new configuraton file information.

NFS is a distributed filesystem. An NFS server has one or more filesystems that are mounted by NFS clients; to the NFS clients, the remote disks look like local disks. NFS filesystems are mounted using the standard Unix mount command, and all Unix utilities work just as well with NFS-mounted files as they do with files on local disks. NFS makes system administration easier because it eliminates the need to maintain multiple copies of files on several machines: all NFS clients share a single copy of the file on the NFS server. NFS also makes life easier for users: instead of logging on to many different systems and moving files from one system to another, a user can stay on one system and access all the files that he or she needs within one consistent file tree.

This book contains detailed descriptions of these services, including configuration information, network design and planning considerations, and debugging, tuning, and analysis tips. If you are going to be installing a new network, expanding or fixing an existing network, or looking for mechanisms to manage data in a distributed environment, you should find this book helpful.

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