System Administration Guide: Basic Administration

Name Services

If you are managing user accounts for a large site, you might want to consider using a name or directory service such as LDAP, or NIS or NIS+. A name or directory service enables you to store user account information in a centralized manner instead of storing user account information in every system's /etc files. When you use a name or directory service for user accounts, users can move from system to system using the same user account without having site-wide user account information duplicated on every system. Using a name or directory service also promotes centralized and consistent user account information.