NIS+ Principals

NIS+ principals are the entities (clients) that submit requests for NIS+ services. An NIS+ principal may be someone who is logged in to a client machine as a regular user, someone who is logged in as superuser, or any process that runs with superuser permission on an NIS+ client machine. Thus, an NIS+ principal can be a client user or a client machine.

An NIS+ principal can also be the entity that supplies an NIS+ service from an NIS+ server. Since all NIS+ servers are also NIS+ clients, much of this discussion also applies to servers.