Re: tlug: NFS question

[Rex Walters <rex@example.com>]

>>>>> Manuel M. T. Chakravarty writes:  (on 15 Oct 98)

> Is there any reason that you don't like to use NIS?  (Just
> curious, because I thought that is the way to go in the
> outlined setup.)

It's a pretty big security hole in general, and I just despised it when
SunOS used to force you to use it for hostname resolution (you had to
either replace shared libraries or do it the Sun way of first querying
NIS and only going to DNS if the name wasn't found).  

The biggest advantage to copying things to a local disk (via rdist or
whatever) is that you aren't dependent on servers & networks at boot
time.

Personally, I like using NIS for some stuff, but I'm uncomfortable using
it for important things like authentication or hostname lookups.  It's a
pretty nice way of replicating general purpose (key,value) databases if
you aren't too concerned about security and reliability.

As usual (grin) my favorite mechanism for large dbm-like (key,value)
persistent hashes is a Dan Berstein original:
"http://pobox.com/~djb/cdb.html".  Doesn't have network
replication/access features, and it's oriented to read-mostly
applications, but it's useful nonetheless.  Felix von Leitner (Fefe) of
vim fame has a really interesting extension to cdb to make a nice
"light" rdbm (i.e.  no sql or heavy relational query capabilities):
"http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~leitner/rdb/".

Universities are most likely to benefit from storing passwd files in a
dbm or cdb.  If you've only got a relatively small number of users,
though (~100) a simple flat file should be sufficient.

Distributed authentication is really hard to do well.  Most networked
solutions are either insecure (NIS) or too complex (DCE).  I like just
moving files around because it's conceptually simple.

Regards,
-- 
Rex
---------------------------------------------------------------
Next Nomikai: 20 November, 19:30 Tengu TokyoEkiMae 03-3275-3691
Next Meeting: 12 December, 12:30 Tokyo Station Yaesu central gate
---------------------------------------------------------------
Sponsor: PHT, makers of TurboLinux http://www.pht.co.jp