.\" Copyright (c) 1995 .\" Bill Paul . All rights reserved. .\" .\" Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without .\" modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions .\" are met: .\" 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright .\" notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. .\" 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright .\" notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the .\" documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. .\" 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software .\" must display the following acknowledgement: .\" This product includes software developed by Bill Paul. .\" 4. Neither the name of the author nor the names of any co-contributors .\" may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software .\" without specific prior written permission. .\" .\" THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY Bill Paul AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND .\" ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE .\" IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE .\" ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL Bill Paul OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE .\" FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL .\" DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS .\" OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) .\" HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT .\" LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY .\" OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF .\" SUCH DAMAGE. .\" .\" $Id: ypserv.8,v 1.2 1996/01/30 13:52:50 mpp Exp $ .\" .Dd February 4, 1995 .Dt YPSERV 8 .Os .Sh NAME .Nm ypserv .Nd "NIS database server" .Sh SYNOPSIS .Nm ypserv .Op Fl n .Op Fl d .Op Fl k .Op Fl p Ar path .Sh DESCRIPTION .Nm NIS is an RPC-based service designed to allow a number of UNIX-based machines to share a common set of configuration files. Rather than requiring a system administrator to update several copies of files such as .Pa /etc/hosts , .Pa /etc/passwd and .Pa /etc/group , which tend to require frequent changes in most environments, NIS allows groups of computers to share one set of data which can be updated from a single location. .Pp .Nm ypserv is the server that distributes NIS databases to client systems within an NIS .Nm domain. Each client in an NIS domain must have its domainname set to one of the domains served by .Nm ypserv using the .Xr domainname 1 command. The clients must also run .Xr ypbind 8 in order to attach to a particular server, since it is possible to have several servers within a single NIS domain. .Pp The databases distributed by .Nm ypserv are stored in .Pa /var/yp/[domainname] where .Pa domainname is the name of the domain being served. There can be several such directories with different domainnames, and you need only one .Nm ypserv daemon to handle them all. .Pp The databases, or .Pa maps as they are often called, are created by .Nm /var/yp/Makefile using several system files as source. The database files are in .Xr db 3 format to help speed retrieval when there are many records involved. In FreeBSD, the maps are always readable and writable only by root for security reasons. Technically this is only necessary for the password maps, but since the data in the other maps can be found in other world-readable files anyway, it doesn't hurt and it's considered good general practice. .Pp .Nm ypserv is started by .Nm /etc/rc if it has been enabled in .Nm /etc/sysconfig. .Sh SPECIAL FEATURES There are some problems associated with distributing FreeBSD's password database via NIS: FreeBSD normally only stores encrypted passwords in .Pa /etc/master.passwd , which is readable and writable only by root. By turning this file into an NIS map, this security feature would be completely defeated. .Pp To make up for this, the FreeBSD version of .Nm ypserv handles the .Pa master.passwd.byname and .Pa master.passwd.byuid maps in a special way. When the server receives a request to access either of these two maps, it will check the TCP port from which the request originated and return an error if the port number is greater than 1023. Since only the superuser is allowed to bind to TCP ports with values less than 1024, the server can use this test to determine whether or not the access request came from a privileged user. Any requests made by non-privileged users are therefore rejected. .Pp Furthermore, the .Xr getpwent 3 routines in FreeBSD's standard C library will only attempt to retrieve data from the .Pa master.passwd.byname and .Pa master.passwd.byuid maps for the superuser: if a normal user calls any of these functions, the standard .Pa passwd.byname and .Pa passwd.byuid maps will be accessed instead. The latter two maps are constructed by .Nm /var/yp/Makefile by parsing the .Pa master.passwd file and stripping out the password fields, and are therefore safe to pass on to unprivileged users. In this way, the shadow password aspect of the protected .Pa master.passwd database is maintained through NIS. .Pp .Sh NOTES .Ss Limitations There are two problems inherent with password shadowing in NIS that users should be aware of: .Bl -enum -offset indent .It The 'TCP port less than 1024' test is trivial to defeat for users with unrestricted access to machines on your network (even those machines which do not run UNIX-based operating systems). .It If you plan to use a FreeBSD system to serve non-FreeBSD clients that have no support for password shadowing (which is most of them), you will have to disable the password shadowing entirely by uncommenting the .Nm UNSECURE=True entry in .Nm /var/yp/Makefile . This will cause the standard .Pa passwd.byname and .Pa passwd.byuid maps to be generated with valid encrypted password fields, which is necessary in order for non-FreeBSD clients to perform user authentication through NIS. .El .Pp .Ss Security .Nm ypserv has support for Wietse Venema's .Pa tcpwrapper package built in, though it is not compiled in by default since the .Pa tcpwrapper package is not distributed with FreeBSD. However, if you have .Nm libwrap.a and .Nm tcpd.h , you can easily recompile .Nm ypserv with them, thereby enabling its 'securenets' features: you can configure .Nm ypserv to only handle requests from machines listed in the .Pa tcpwrapper configuration files, which would help limit vulnerability to the first limitation listed above. .Pp .Ss NIS servers that are also NIS clients Care must be taken when running .Nm ypserv in a multi-server domain where the server machines are also NIS clients. It is generally a good idea to force the servers to bind to themselves rather than allowing them to broadcast bind requests and possibly become bound to each other: strange failure modes can result if one server goes down and others are dependent upon on it. (Eventually all the clients will time out and attempt to bind to other servers, but the delay involved can be considerable and the failure mode is still present since the servers might bind to each other all over again). .Pp Refer to the .Xr ypbind 8 man page for details on how to force it to bind to a particular server. .Sh OPTIONS The following options are supported by .Nm ypserv : .Bl -tag -width flag .It Fl n This option affects the way .Nm ypserv handles yp_match requests for the .Pa hosts.byname and .Pa hosts.byaddress maps. By default, if .Nm ypserv can't find an entry for a given host in its hosts maps, it will return an error and perform no further processing. With the .Fl n flag, .Nm ypserv will go one step further: rather than giving up immediately, it will try to resolve the hostname or address using a DNS nameserver query. If the query is successful, .Nm ypserv will construct a fake database record and return it to the client, thereby making it seem as though the client's yp_match request succeeded. .Pp This feature is provided for compatibility with SunOS 4.1.x, which has brain-damaged resolver functions in its standard C library that depend on NIS for hostname and address resolution. FreeBSD's resolver can be configured to do DNS queries directly, therefore it is not necessary to enable this option when serving only FreeBSD NIS clients. .It Fl d Causes the server to run in debugging mode. Normally, .Nm ypserv reports only unusual errors (access violations, file access failures) using the .Xr syslog 3 facility. In debug mode, the server does not background itself and prints extra status messages to stderr for each request that it receives. Also, while running in debug mode, .Nm ypserv will not spawn any additional subprocesses as it normally does when handling yp_all requests or doing DNS lookups. (These actions often take a fair amount of time to complete and are therefore handled in subprocesses, allowing the parent server process to go on handling other requests.) This makes it easier to trace the server with a debugging tool. .It Fl k This flag is provided for compatibility with SunOS 4. The .Xr ypbind 8 command in SunOS 4 apparently expects to obtain a response from an NIS v1 server. Starting .Xr ypserv 8 with the .Fl k flag causes it to register itself as an NIS v1 server and respond to YPPROC_DOMAIN_NONACK requests. Note carefully: this is merely a kludge (hence the 'k') to pacify SunOS 4's .Xr ypbind 8 command: attempts to make the server actually handle NIS v1 queries will undoubtedly fail quite miserably. .It Fl p Ar path Normally, .Nm ypserv assumes that all NIS maps are stored under .Pa /var/yp . The .Fl p flag may be used to specify an alternate NIS root path, allowing the system administrator to move the map files to a different place within the filesystem. .El .Sh FILES .Bl -tag -width Pa -compact .It Pa /var/yp/[domainname]/[maps] The NIS maps. .It Pa /etc/host.conf Resolver configuration file. .El .Sh SEE ALSO .Xr ypcat 1 , .Xr db 3 , .Xr yp 4 , .Xr ypbind 8 , .Xr yppasswdd 8 , .Xr yppush 8 , .Xr ypxfr 8 .Sh AUTHOR Bill Paul .Sh HISTORY This version of .Nm ypserv first appeared in FreeBSD 2.1.