also forgot, it's important not to forget the spiritual successor to the client side of nis which is sssd. i think it might be a redhat or canonical thing. eit

also forgot, it's important not to forget the spiritual successor to the client side of nis which is sssd. i think it might be a redhat or canonical thing. either way, if you are insisting on doing live network queries for passwd entries, you generally want it, as it will cache in the event that the network goes down. one of the reasons to prefer flat files is if getpwnam and friends start to hang or return inconsistent results, the system will become unresponsive or misbehave in all sorts of amusing ways.