Re: foo.baz.edu ???

["matthew sporleder" <msporleder%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 9:30 AM, Chavdar Ivanov <ci4ic4%gmail.com@localhost> 
wrote:
> On 27/06/2008, Bryan Pierce <bdpierce3%bdpierce.com@localhost> wrote:
>> Hello Everyone!!!
>>
>>  I've had my NebBSD system installed for about a week - what an educational
>> experience!!!
>>  I've gone from total "newb" to setting up a BIND name server on OS X (that
>> is cool!!!)
>>
>>  But I still have not been able to figure out what the...  "NIS domain name"
>> formerly Internet YP and not
>>  to be confused with an internet domain name" ... is.
>>
>>  In retrospect the "foo.baz.edu" example does clarify that Hostname is not
>> just "foo" and so that
>>  we can assume that Domain name is not "baz.edu"
>>
>>  In fact, now that I have my own name server (!), I don't even have to worry
>> about whether my Hostname
>>  is real or fictitious, because I my NetBSD computer has a "real" hostname
>>
>>  But I've read the definition for domain name over and over and over...I've
>> read man pages, NetBSD Wiki,
>>  done Google searches... oh yeah...I actually came up with an example
>>    # root@earth    domainname planet
>>
>>  OK, all sarcasm aside, I couldn't find any examples.
>>
>>  Without an example, I don't have a clue whether it's supposed to be a dns
>> domain name (i.e. if I had web-server,
>>  this would be my domain name) or whether it's supposed to be a dns name
>> server
>>  (my intuition tells me it's not the website addy to the NIS yellow pages)
>>
>>  Could somebody please give me a simple answer to this question :-)
>>  What is a NIS domaine name (according to my NetBSD operating system)?
>
> NIS domain name has nothing to do with DNS.
>
> If you don't know about it, just forget it - you don't need it.
>
> NIS is just a replicated database of tables like hosts, passwd, group,
> netgroup etc. If you have a few Unix boxes in a LAN, you would want to
> have the above data synchronized, i.e. have the same user/passwords,
> hosts etc. NIS allows you to maintain this on one host, have it
> replicated to slave servers and used by many machines.
>
> The overhead of maintaining NIS is too high to consider it with less
> than ten hosts in my view. In a corporate environment my experience is
> that it is one thing which tends to bury itself deep into the
> infrastructure and is difficult to replace - especially when one has
> to maintain 10 year old systems with long-unsupported OS... So stear
> clear from it.
>
> Sun brought replacement for it - NIS+ - which I have to admit I have
> never used. If you need to have that sort of information network
> available, consider LDAP.
>

STRONGLY consider LDAP as sun deprecated NIS+ a few years ago
(although it was never removed from anything).  :)

Here are some naming services docs if you'd like to check them out:
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/816-4556/intro2ns-2?l=en&q=NIS+LDAP&a=view

Just translate all the sun stuff to netbsd.  The "yellow pages/yp"
stuff was the original name for NIS until whoever owned the real
yellow pages didn't like the name reuse.

If you want to get really confused about DNS and NIS, check out Hesiod.


>>
>>  I apologize for any sarcasm that is seeping through. but I've gone all out
>> buggy trying to figure out the answer
>>  on my own. So any help would be really, really, really appreciated!!! :D
>>