Wednesday September 29, 2004

My old friend NIS+

Before I joined Sun I worked at a company who use Sun hardware for mathematical modelling. I was the SA. Like all Sun customers I was faced with learning and using Solaris 2.x on our servers/deskops. Being keen on new technology even then I looked at NIS+. Essentially we had a single NIS domain pretty simple but I was sure NIS+ was the way to go. So I took a SparcStation ELC home and loaded Solaris 2.2 on it and created my first NIS+ domain. Of course then you did not have the nifty nisclient/nisserver/nispopulate scripts to aid configuration. I went through each nis* command, what it did and so on. We then created the 'live' NIS+ domain back at work and kept it up to date with NIS until we could throw NIS away. ( we ran the NIS+ domain in NIS compatibility mode for the Pc-nfs clients though.) Security was not an issue in this workplace but the ability for non root admins to add/change entries in NIS+ anywhere on that network was awsome. I wish we had done more to better use some of its other features but I learnt about them later on...

Little did I realise that learning about NIS+ would help me get a job at Sun. I joined as a solution centre engineer and used a NIS+ domain still in existance created by my long time mentor and friend in Sun. He brought it to life on guy fawkes night.....

It was not until we both moved on to another support organisation in Sun that for me NIS+'s multi domain possibilities came to be seen. As the internal support organisation did not have global logins and we needed to have that to allow our engineers to share data/ideas/lab equipment we setup a three domain environment. One domain in Singapore, West coast of the US and in the UK. Many of our tools were built on top of the NIS+ technology.

I remember creating the Singapore domain while on rotation there. (with help from my mentor..) Sitting in the office and being able to login with my existing unix login/passwd on a remote domain was awsome. It was the enabling technology that brought the three groups of engineers together into one virtual team. Clever things were done with automount maps that allowed you to for example cd /share/us and see the equivalent filesystems in the US '/share' directories as we had in the UK. We learnt about the problems of replication and how to solve issues when remote sites went down and how the impacted their peers. We setup a local_dir for information that did not need replicating around the world like mail_aliases and ethernet addresses.

Now of course NIS+ is in its twilight years. The world is looking at LDAP. But for me this technology was awe inspiring and typical of the level of technical competance and mega ideas into action stuff Sun is great at doing. We see this continuing with the features in Solaris 10, containers, ZFS see Solaris10