NIS Explained
by Virtual Circuit and Psychotic

NIS or Network Information Systems is a concept of unix that users need to
learn. NIS used to be called the "Yellow Pages" until somebody pointed out
that it was the trademark of the phone company.

When a company has to many workstations the best way to set them up is to
have them connect and share files by means of NFS. Then you should give
access to the machines to your users so that they will have one large
system. Keeping all the workstations' administrative information organized
is a small problem.  A password file was given to each individual system in
order to list the users and a set of mount points or directories. In 50
workstations, when the system added a new users those user had to be added
to 50 seperate password files, etc.  The only way to ease this problem was
to use NIS. It puts nearly all of the administrative information in one
place that is roganized by NIS.  It makes all the availlable workstation
accessable by each of the new users. This works out very well.  After the
administrator updates the master files the database can get clumsy and out
of sync. This is usually caused by the admin regenerating the NIS database
and accidently making a mistake.The design of NIS makes it possible to
create security holes. The computers are accesible to only a small group of
users but it makes it easy for one of the million internet hackers to break
in.

You work from here. I'll update this text later with more info on this
system setup.