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 4.x 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 a more detailed model for objects in the name space, improved security, 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 itself. 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 the SunOS 4.x release 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.x software, sockets are no longer implemented completely in the kernel. They are now in a library, libsocket, implemented on STREAMS.