Networking

The Solaris 7 operating environment includes the following networking features:

• Distributed file system (DFS), which centralizes the file system utilities

• Network information services plus (NIS+) including NFS

• Name service switch file

See NIS+ Transition Guide and NFS Administration Guide for more information on using these services.

NIS, NIS+

The Solaris 7 operating environment supports the network information service (NIS), the SunOS release 4 name service, and the network information services plus (NIS+), an enterprise-naming service of heterogenous distributed systems. See "NIS+" for the nature of NIS+ support available in the Solaris 7 operating environment.

NIS+ provides improved security, a more detailed model for objects in the name space, and faster updates than NIS.

The NIS+ programmer interfaces are documented in section 3N of the man Pages(3): Library Routines.

nsswitch.conf File

The nsswitch.conf file simplifies name service administration. Applications can use this file to select a name service. This information no longer needs to be hard-coded into the service. See the nsswitch.conf(4) man page for more information on the format of this file.

Network Interface Tap

The Network Interface Tap (NIT) provided in SunOS release 4 is no longer required. Now Ethernet drivers are real STREAMS drivers that can be opened and communicated with directly.

See pfmod(7M), bufmod(7M), and dlpi(7P)

The Solaris 7 Ethernet drivers and other data link drivers support the connectionless Data Link Provider Interface (DLPI) Version 2 specification.

Sockets

Sockets are supported in the Solaris 7 operating environment. Unlike the SunOS release 4 software, sockets are no longer implemented completely in the kernel. They are now in a library, libsocket, implemented on STREAMS.