I had a few more replies to my original summary - and I also
received some "from the horses' mouth" info. from the NIS+ FAQ
maintainer, wesley.chun_at_Eng.Sun.COM (Wesley J. Chun). It appears
Sun are finally going to publish the details of the NIS+ RFC -
lets face it- who would want to pay to use NIS+ ?
Many thanks to all who responded.
Ian
PS The NIS+ FAQ (very nice it is too) is at:
http://beta.ece.ucsb.edu/~wesc/nis+faq.html
I originally asked:
>Dear All
>
>has anyone ever seen NIS+ client code available for
>Digital UNIX (or any other non-Sun UNIX, for that matter)?
>
>Alternatively, what can I do about serving out the passwd/group
>files from our Sun NIS+ server to our DEC clients? At the
>moment I have to defeat the authentication on these two
>maps by allowing non-authenticated hosts access to the tables -
>which sort of defeats the purpose of having NIS+ in the first
>place...
>
>Will summarise.
-----
Crispin Harris <crispin_at_communica.com.au>:
This is unfortunately true - SUN are maintaining NIS+ as a proprietary
and private codebase. Access to the code is available only after
obtaining SunOS 5.5 & NIS+ source code licenses. (Funnily enough,
these come with quite a significant NonDisclosureAgreement attached!)
Sun announced (at an early point) that NIS+ would not be available to
third party developers except through joint development agreements
whereby the NIS+ development team would provide object code modules
for the third-party developer. [Note: some of this is hearsay, and I
have no direct (provable) sources for this information.]
NIS+ clients are not available for DU (tm). The main problems are in
the client/principal authentication, and the kernel integration.
NIS+ uses a (fortunately) documented SecureRPC communication format
for communications, however I have not seen the packet format listed
anywhere nor anything network-side off the API.
[Thus implementing the NIS+ API is somewhat troublesome :-( ]
Sorry about confirming tha bad news.
-----
Jim Neeland <neeland_at_madmax.hrl.hac.com>
I've heard rumors that nobody has chosen to support NIS+
on any platform other than Sun+Solaris, which I guess is in keeping
with what you've heard also.
-----
Tim Mooney <mooney_at_dogbert.cc.ndsu.NoDak.edu>:
HP is the only company I know of that has licensed ONC+ from Sun. HP
has
announced plans to make NIS+ & company available in HP-UX some time down
the road -- I believe the target date was 1998Q1 but this is from memory
so I could be way off. I would guess that it will be available as an
unbundled product (you'll have to pay extra to get it -- I doubt it will
come with the OS).
-----
Becki S Kain <bkain1_at_ford.com>:
When I took the NIS+ class given by Sun two years ago, it was not
released on
any other platform. I doubt this has changed.
-----
Marc Bejarano <beej_at_media.mit.edu>:
nis+ is only available for sun and hp, at this time...
-----
wesley.chun_at_Eng.Sun.COM (Wesley J. Chun):
It is public information that HP and DEC have licensed
the source code. I don't know about other vendors like
SGI. We are working on getting the RFC published so that
*everyone* can finally go write their own clients, and
perhaps server extensions.
--
Ian Thurlbeck http://www.stams.strath.ac.uk/
Statistics and Modelling Science, University of Strathclyde
Livingstone Tower, 26 Richmond Street, Glasgow, UK, G1 1XH
Tel: +44 141 552 4400 ext 3667 Fax: +44 141 552 2079
Received on Mon Oct 14 1996 - 19:47:18 NZDT