[ale] NIS & YP

[Byron A Jeff]

> 
> I'm courious about NIS & YP.  I read the howto this weekend and it
> sounded like somthing I was interested in but I don't understand how it
> deals with user ids.  Lets say I have 3 computers running NIS and they
> are considered work group servers and on each of them I mount the others
> harddrive.  When a user from computer A logs in does that user get a
> unique user ID so that if he writes somthing to one of the NFS mounted 
> drives It has his unique uiser id.

With NIS there is essentially only one copy of the password (and other)
files that are shared among the three machines. So the user on computer A
has the same login and same UID on all three machines. And that ID is
tagged on any files he writes including the NFS mounted ones. Since all
the machines share the same password database, the user can log into
machines B and C with the same login/password/UID as machine A and access
the NFS files exactly the same way from all three machines.

BAJ