ParaNIS - Towards NIS client support for OSF/1 AD on the Intel Paragon

This paper presents the ParaNIS project, an attempt to implement Sun Microsystems’ Network Information Service Version 2 (formerly known as Yellow Pages) for the client side on the service partition of the Intel Paragon supercomputer. After a brief introduction to user administration on traditional UNIX systems, an overview of the classical NIS service is given. Whereas NIS was designed for central configuration management within a LAN of UNIX-based systems, ParaNIS tries to integrate the user administration on workstations and a locally attached supercomputer like the Intel Paragon all together.