NIS vs LDAP

NIS is the traditional domain controller and identity service for Linux-only environments. It still works fine for this purpose today, but it is more limited than LDAP. It replicates the data in /etc/ from the group, hosts, mail, netgroup, networks, passwd, printcap, protocols, rpc, and service directories - out to all domain joined hosts in the network. These files comprise information that is also stored in LDAP when connected to Linux. However LDAP is also compatible with Windows where NIS has only limited Windows compatibilities.

LDAP is an extensible data framework, meaning that it can manage data for tasks that many not be explicitly defined by standard LDAP structures. That is to say, LDAP can be customized to store data for whatever purpose the network needs. Examples of LDAP data constructs are:

• anything NIS does
• mail routing
• address book for mail clients
• zone descriptions for BIND9
• Samba authentication

Therefore, LDAP is generally preferred over NIS when supported, and especially in heterogeneous environments. Even Linux-only environments may prefer to deploy and LDAP directory, since LDAP has become so ubiquitous. This is also influenced by the Samba project(https://www.samba.org) which is the free and open source implementation of LDAP.