Network Information Service

Overview

Network Information Service, short for NIS, is no longer supported. Yet, there are many large companies who are still using NIS as the major backbone of their identity information. Penrose allows NIS entries to be translated into LDAP entries in a real-time manner. This avoid the expensive ETL (extract, transform and load) operations to re-import/export NIS to LDAP.

Installing NIS Server and Client
Read more about LDAP Gateway vs NIS Gateway

Penrose provides a NIS adapter which can be used to expose NIS information as LDAP entries. The NIS adapter can access the NIS information in several ways:

using YP client
using Sun's NIS service provider for JNDI (experimental)
local file (experimental)

Configuration

Make sure the NIS adapter is defined in the global partition (PENROSE_SERVER_HOME/conf/server.xml) or in the partition that uses the NIS functionality (PENROSE_SERVER_HOME/partitions/<partition>/DIR-INF/partition.xml).

<adapter name="NIS">
  <adapter-class>org.safehaus.penrose.nis.adapter.NISAdapter</adapter-class>
</adapter>

The connection to NIS server should be defined in the PENROSE_SERVER_HOME/conf/connections.xml or PENROSE_SERVER_HOME/partitions/<partition>/DIR-INF/connections.xml.

With YP client the connection should be configured as follows:

<connection name="NIS">
  <adapter-name>NIS</adapter-name>
  <parameter>
    <param-name>java.naming.provider.url</param-name>
    <param-value>...</param-value>
  </parameter>
  <parameter>
    <param-name>method</param-name>
    <param-value>yp</param-value>
  </parameter>
</connection>

With JNDI client the connection should be configured as follows:

<connection name="NIS">
  <adapter-name>NIS</adapter-name>
  <parameter>
    <param-name>java.naming.factory.initial</param-name>
    <param-value>com.sun.jndi.nis.NISCtxFactory</param-value>
  </parameter>
  <parameter>
    <param-name>java.naming.provider.url</param-name>
    <param-value>...</param-value>
  </parameter>
  <parameter>
    <param-name>com.sun.jndi.nis.mailaliases</param-name>
    <param-value>nonull</param-value>
  </parameter>
  <parameter>
    <param-name>method</param-name>
    <param-value>jndi</param-value>
  </parameter>
</connection>

With local file the connection should be configured as follows:

<connection name="NIS">
  <adapter-name>NIS</adapter-name>
  <parameter>
    <param-name>method</param-name>
    <param-value>local</param-value>
  </parameter>
</connection>

The NIS server hostname and domain name should be specified in the java.naming.provider.url in this form: nis://<hostname>/<domain>.

To expose the NIS maps as LDAP entries, they need to be mapped into some subtrees in the virtual DIT:

Example

A sample NIS partition is available at PENROSE_SERVER_HOME/samples/nis folder. Simply copy this folder into PENROSE_SERVER_HOME/partitions folder, then configure the connection to point to your NIS server.

Reference

Sys Admin Guide NIS

Overview

Documentation

Developers

Support

Page Operations

Browse Space

Overview

Configuration

Example

NIS Synchronization

NIS Sync Agent

UIDs GIDs Conflict Resolution Module

Reference