Principal

An NIS+ principal may be someone who is logged in to a client machine as a regular user or someone who is logged in as superuser (root). In the first instance, the request actually comes from the client user; in the second instance, the request comes from the client workstation. Therefore, an NIS+ principal can be a client user or a client workstation.

(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.)