On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 11:23:19AM -0500, John Hasler wrote: > Gene writes: > > Define NIS please. > > Network Information Service. You've never heard of it because it's > obsolete. You should ignore it. > > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Information_Service>
Originally known as "Yellow Pages" (YP), the name had to be changed because of trademarks. However, most of the NIS command names begin with "yp" (ypinit, ypwhich, ypset, and so on) and those never changed. For reasons unknown to me, "domainname" is one of the exceptions. Why they didn't call it "ypdomainname" or "ypdomain", I do not know. If you don't know what NIS is, that's totally fine. You obviously don't use it or need it. Even among actual NIS users, the use of NIS's hostname resolution features is *severely* deprecated. Common advice is to use NIS only for users, groups, service names, and things associated with those. For hostname resolution, you should use DNS instead. In any case, both NIS and DNS have a "domain name", but they are different and it's important not to mix them up. On systems that use both, it's common for the two domain names to be different from each other, to avoid accidents. (On some of my systems at work, the NIS domain name is "neurology" whereas the DNS domain name is "eeg.ccf.org".)
