nis/nfs alternative?

hi all. I am looking for a good up-to-date alternative to NIS and NFS. Is there such a thing?

What is wrong with nfs? Look into kerberos for replacing nis.

What are you needing it for?? filesharing??

i currently have my filesystem spread across two computers and im wondering how secure nfs and nis are and whether there are better alternatives?

I dont use NIs or NFS anymore. I´m using rsync or scp to sync directorys and files. Sometimes SAMBA if i can´t solve it on another way..

There is nothing wrong with NFS but I would only use it over a lan. There are more secure options like OpenAFS but setting up/admin of that is much harder then NFS. NFSv4 is in the 2.6 kernel which looks really nice. Has a lot of improvements and added features that OpenAFS has. I want to setup a few test machines at work to try it out. I wouldn't want to use rsync to share something like home dir since it would be a pain to constantly sync the 2. I would stay away from samba just because it is slow and I don't like the idea of using a microsoft technology to share between 2 linux machines.

Yes NFS is simple and easy to set up, but it has been stamped as unsecure and therefore it are forbidden on the most sites i have worked on.

Samba is good because most of the time when you are gona share directorys in the beginning it may only be between 2 linux boxes but most of the time some winblowse box also must have access, then you have already buildt the infrastructre to add it. Otherwhise you have to to the work again... And is it really slow?? I have never got that impression... have you read som benchamrk study or something??

Yes NFS isn't the most secure which is why I would only use it on a lan(not like i would want to route samba over the net either). If I needed to use a network filesystem over the net, I would use openafs or setup vpn's to run nfs over. From past experiences(working with linux fileserver running nfs and samba), for linux -> linux transfers, NFS was quite faster then samba. For linux -> windows, samba outperformed nfs(about 4-5x faster). I tried the unix services for windows which supports nfs but it had horrible transfer speeds. So I think it comes down to just picking the right tool for the enviroment.