why nis?
Network Information System (NIS) is designed to centralize administration of UNIXÂ®-like systems such as Solarisâ¢, HP-UX, AIXÂ®, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD. NIS was originally known as Yellow Pages but the name was changed due to trademark issues. This is the reason why NIS commands begin with yp. NIS is a Remote Procedure Call (RPC)-based client/server system that allows a group of machines within an NIS domain to share a common set of configuration files.