NIS or NIS+ (aka. NYS) ?

# 3 NIS or NIS+ (aka. NYS) ?

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The choice between NIS and NIS+ is a question of flexibility vs. maturity. Generally NIS has been around longer and sometimes suffers from its age, inflexibility, and administration difficulties. NIS+ addresses all these problems, provides more flexibility, is easier to set up and administer, and is backward compatable with NIS servers and thus recommended for first time users setting up Linux machines within a NIS enviroment. However, unlike NIS which is integrated into the standard C library, NIS+ requires you to relink all deamons and clients wishing to access these services with the NYS library libnsl.a (similarly to SYSV - or the shared library libnsl.so). However, once clients and deamons are compiled with NYS, they bypass the /etc/host.conf mechanism totally (for host lookups) and determine their resolving mechanism via the /etc/nsswitch.conf file.

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