# Yellow Pages?



## Phishfry (Jul 12, 2022)

Can anyone tell me what are the yp* things I see in FreeBSD.
Generally is this old cruft? I never hear it mentioned.
Is YP/NIS widely in use?
I thought YP meant Yellow Pages but not sure here.


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## Jose (Jul 12, 2022)

If memory serves, "yp" did indeed stand for "yellow pages" once upon a time. The company that printed the big yellow books and dumped them at your doorstep owned a trademark on that phrase and sued or threatened to sue. Thus the renaming to "NIS".


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## zirias@ (Jul 12, 2022)

Phishfry said:


> Generally is this old cruft?


IMHO, yes. If you need a directory nowadays, look towards ldap (or, Microsoft's integrated "AD" solution also implemented by samba).


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## Jose (Jul 12, 2022)

NIS always was kind of a nightmare. So is LDAP to be fair. I've heard AD is "Kerberized LDAP", but I avoid that stuff like the plague.


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## zirias@ (Jul 12, 2022)

Jose the nice thing about AD (well, I use samba's implementation) is that it mostly spares you the gory details of both LDAP and kerberos. YMMV of course


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## Jose (Jul 12, 2022)

Yeah, not interested:


			Re: Updating Samba
		






						BIND9 DLZ DNS Back End - SambaWiki
					






					wiki.samba.org


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## sko (Jul 12, 2022)

LDAP is nice, as is NIS - if it works and you don't have to look at how the sausage is made.
If you have to built a network that uses any of those, make sure to have plenty of alcoholic beverages for after hours until it works as intended on _every_ edge case.

I've ran a relatively basic installation of NIS for logins on client systems and NFS for remote home directories.
As long as all servers and services were up and running, it was nicely working - but restart one of the servers or services, and all hell breaks loose (especially on the client end) as everything depends on each other (I didn't get the ressources to build any redundancy...). Mix in an old megaraid controller on the NFS host that thinks it's a teapot randomly for ~30 seconds every few hours and you just want to burn everything down.


AD is a completely different can of worms, as it drags in TONS of mandatory dependencies (as usual in the microsoft world...).
NIS can run completely on its own and e.g. just add to the local user/group files. So you can run it for really small tasks on a small scale without major impact or the need to change everything throughout your whole network.
Same goes for LDAP, although wrapping your head around its arcane architecture might be a challenge...


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## Jose (Jul 12, 2022)

I heard NIS+ was even worse, but have been mercifully spared. I had never heard of Hesiod. Interesting:





						Hesiod (name service) - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org


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## SirDice (Jul 12, 2022)

Jose said:


> I've heard AD is "Kerberized LDAP"


Kerberos, LDAP and DNS all went out one Friday night, which ended in a drunken stupor. The result was a bastard child called Active Directory Services


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## Phishfry (Jul 12, 2022)

The same kerbos I used with FTP? They sure do get around.


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## forquare (Jul 13, 2022)

Not surprisingly, we used to run NIS+ in the services lab at Sun Microsystems for all logins, DNS, and a bunch of other things - IIRC we had a bunch of machine information in it which our net install system would use to make various decisions.

Between 2009 and somewhere around 2015 I was running NIS at home for DNS and logins for an OpenSolaris server and some Linux VMs.  I decommissioned it because the ReadyNAS that replaced the OpenSolaris server didn't do NIS, and I gradually reduced the number of computers at home.
I'm starting to get back to the point where centralised logins would be useful again, but think I'd probably explore LDAP or AD/Samba.


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## tingo (Jul 14, 2022)

If only Novell had managed to 
a) survive for a few years more
b) release the specifications for NDS (Novell Directory Services) as an open specification
maybe then we would have a reasonable alternative.


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