NIS and different systems

[Craig A. Sharp]

Hello,

I have an environment that has multiple areas for CAD and engineereing utilizing HP, SGI and SUN unix boxes.
I want to implement NIS on an HP server.
My problem is this. All information that I have found on NIS states that a single server handles all the host and authentication files for a single domain. This is fine and I have a working system with a single domain that serves HP systems. Different systems have directory structures and as such, a passwd file on one type of system such as SGI will not be compatable with the passwd file on an HP or SUN due to these differences. Also other types of system files available in NIS may not be compatable between systems.

This brings me to the actual question. Can NIS handle multiple sets of files for each type of system? Example, can I have a set of files that are for HP and a set for SGI and have each respective system access only their files? All of this must reside on a single HP server.

If so please explain how this is done or possibly point me in the right direction.

Thanks,

Craig A. Sharp

[Mike McKinlay]

Craig -- if what you mean is that you want the Sun, SGI, and HP users to share files between each others' systems, then NIS you also need to implement NFS, Network File System, CIFS, Samba or some other file system sharing functionality in order to enable access to files for users on multiple systems.

[Mike McKinlay]

Craig -- if what you mean is that you want the Sun, SGI, and HP users to share files between each others' systems, then NIS you also need to implement NFS, Network File System, CIFS, Samba or some other file system sharing functionality in order to enable access to files for users on multiple systems.

[Craig A. Sharp]

I think you misunderstand what I need. I need NIS to have multiple filesets based on the system type. Example: The NIS clients on the HP boxes would access one set of files on the NIS server such as passwd, hosts, services, etc.
The NIS clients on the SGI would access a different set of files on the NIS server.

Does this help?

Thanks,

Craig

[Madhu Sudhan_1]

Hi Craig !
I think I got the point. No matter what the directory structure or password etc., is in SGI or SUN , You can bring the SGI and SUN clients into NIS HP-DOMAIN. As long as each other can understand NIS protocol, the differences in passwd, services, protocols shouldn't matter.

One fileset at NIS Master server serves all kinds of clients as long as they can understand NIS(Yello Pages ) Protocol and I think you don't need to have seperate filesets for each kind of clients.

Regards,
......Madhu

[Patrick Wallek]

You do NOT need multiple copies of the files on your NIS server, just becuase you have different flavors of NIS clients. You do NOT even need multiple copies of the files if you want to have a NIS Slave Server on one of the other unix flavors.

NIS does not actually copy any of the master files (passwd, hosts, group, etc.) to the client machines. All the files are accessed via the network.

I currently have 2 HP servers that are NIS Slave Servers and the master in our network is a Sun box. This works without a problem.

If you need different copies of the files for the different unix flavors for security reasons, then that can not be accomplished via NIS as far as I know.