On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 9:41 AM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
I'm new to centralized user authentication, and I want to learn how to do it. I've heard that NIS is a deprecated technology, and that one should favour LDAP over it. I'd be curious if someone could explain the facts behind this (or even if it's true or not).
NIS is *very* insecure and I *think* uses clear text (it was a kinder, gentler age). NIS+ is slightly better, but not a whole lot. LDAP is expecting encryption, at least SSL.
That's the heart of it... NIS was fine in a younger and more innocent day :) NIS+ was ostensibly more secure but was a pain to get quite perfect. In many of the shops I visited that were using NIS+ there were lots of misconfigurations that exposed more than planned.