LDAP vs. NIS+

[Justin Zygmont]

On Mon, 14 Nov 2005, Aly Dharshi wrote:

> LDAP is hands down the way to go, even Sun says that NIS+ maybe deprecated in 
> future releases, its a freaking pain in the ass. NIS+ is no being actively 
> developed for Linux, NIS+ is a good exercise in self-inflicted pain (which I 
> will have to go thru' starting 2morrow).
>
> Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:
>> 
>>    Once again I turn to the smart folks on this list.  I'm looking for a 
>> way to centralize our user management.  At the moment I have user logins 
>> that are scattered across several machines.  Ideally I want to have one 
>> central "accounts" machine, where all the user LOGIN data is kept and 
>> maintained.  Then I would have a shell server, where their actual files are 
>> kept.  Users then connect to this shell server only (which then 
>> authenticates the user against the "accounts" machine before letting them 
>> on.)  I will also have a web server and mail spool server which will have 
>> NFS shares, and all of these will have to have some record of the user 
>> information (UID/GID at the very least) for things to work properly.  That 
>> data should be coming from the central "accounts" machine I would think.
>> 
>>    I heard that NIS+ can do what I want to do.  At the same time, I also 
>> heard LDAP may be what I want.  So which is which?  What should I consider 
>> using?  Considering that neither is something I've played with extensively 
>> (I've done some NIS+ stuff eons ago, but never LDAP) this would be a first 
>> for me and having to figure things out from the ground up.
>> 
>>    What does the general public recommend?  And any pointers/suggestions 
>> you might have are also welcome.

I found NIS not all that bad, considering the work involved integrating 
all your services to use LDAP, it may not be all that bad if your needs 
are simple.