| Certification Summary Solaris supports a number of naming services to maintain network information
on servers, which serve this information to the clients. DNS is the naming
service running on the Internet to support TCP/IP networks. DNS makes
communication simpler by using machine names (called domain names) instead of
numerical IP addresses, whereas the focus of NIS is on making network
administration more manageable and less error prone by providing centralized
control over a variety of network information such as machine names, machine
addresses, user names, and network services. Whereas NIS was developed in a
proprietary environment, LDAP is based on an open standard and is poised to
eventually replace NIS. Both LDAP and NIS+ offer security features. The
nsswitch.conf file is used to coordinate the use of different naming services on
your system.
You can use the ypinit command to set up the master server, the slave
servers, and the clients for NIS. NIS is an SMF service under the identifier
/network/nis/server and therefore can be started (enabled), stopped (disabled),
or restarted by using the svcadm command. The NIS information is stored in files
called maps in ndbm format. The maps are created and updated only on the master
server from which they are propagated automatically to the slave servers. You
can set up the LDAP client with the ldapclient command. The DNS client
configuration information resides in the file resolv.conf. The naming service
cache daemon, nscd, provides caching service for most common naming service
requests. This daemon is managed by the SMF under the identifier
system/name-service-cache and therefore can be started or stopped with the
svcadm command, although initially it is automatically started at the boot
time.
In addition to naming services, Solaris offers another important network
service called network file system, which allows machines on a network to share
files. This topic, along with some other issues related to file systems, is
discussed in the next chapter. | 
