Another NIS question

[Tim Rolling]

Do applications need to be aware of NIS/NIS+?

Are there any complications resulting from the use of NIS/NIS+?

With NIS/NIS+ in place, can I select alternate authentication mechanisms using PAM?

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Well written applications will work transparently. Services/hosts/users will be acquired from the appropriate map. The underlying functions like gethostbyname(), getpwnam(), ... all work transparently. The typical problems occur in scripts which simply read /etc/passwd without first determining is this is an NIS client.

[harry d brown jr]

Look at this

http://www.software.hp.com/cgi-bin/swdepot_parser.cgi/cgi/displayProductInfo.pl?productNumber=J4269AA

and make sure to check out

http://docs.hp.com/hpux/internet/#LDAP-UX%20Integration

live free or die
harry

[S.K. Chan]

I'll just answer #3 since to make it complete ..
Yes you can, PAM is and NIS+ is compatible though we know NIS+ uses LDAP. From HP-UX 10.20 onwards PAM is included by default if you install CDE. The method or choice of authentication depends on how /etc/pam.conf is configured.

[Shannon Petry]

In addition to what others have stated, to fix MOST(term used loosely) applications ensure 2 things.
1. Make sure that /etc/nsswitch.conf has nisplus listed

2. add the dummy string to /etc/passwd and group.
I.E.
echo "+::0:0:::" >>/etc/passwd
echo "+::0:" >>/etc/group

Best of luck!
Shannon