Towards role-based administration in network information services

Client-server networks have grown tremendously since the mid-1980s. The information they store changes much more rapidly than it did during the time at beginning. The size and complexity of these networks required new, autonomous administration practices. Network Information Services was designed to address these requirements. As one of the network information services, NIS+ is a widely used network protocol. It allows networked machines to have a common interface regardless of the workstation that a user logs into. NIS+ keeps all information into tables to support a common interface between networked machines. In the most of case these information are controlled by centralized manner. Centralized management of NIS+ tables in large systems is a tedious and costly task. An appealing possibility is to use role and role hierarchy to facilitate decentralized administration of NIS+ tables which has not been previously recognized in the literature. This paper presents decentralized administration of NIS+ tables using the notion of role and also shows how to simulate role hierarchy in NIS+ groups.