[SOLVED] NIS clarification

Could you clarify some thing for me?

At the moment I've got an NFS server working (desktop computer) and an NFS client (laptop) accessing music from the nfs server. If I want to set up NIS server/client, what would its purpose be?
My desktop would be a nis server. As far as I understand I would have to create a nis account (eg. portia) on my laptop and when I log in to this nis account (portia), what would be on the desktop computer?
1. all portia's /home/portia directory?
2. Only portia's configuration files?
3. What would physically be on the laptop? just nis client settings specifying the user portia who's got all the stuff on the destop?

It's confusing to me. Could you please clarify this concept to me?
What are most typical scenarios of using nis?

Thank you for any response.

You really should google this, but I'll give you a potted intro:

NIS stores user account information centrally - username, password, uid/group id's. Doing this makes it very useful if you're using NFS mounts, so your permissions work the correct way even on machines remote to the server.

If you're ever going to be using your laptop away from the server machine, then you really dont want to use NIS on it, the safest option is to set up user accounts with names and UID/GID's the same as they are on the server, but stored locally.

You dont need to use NIS - it's relatively insecure but for small private networks it does the job well. There are many alternatives, the flashest I've seen (and used) is to use LDAP to feed user account information to the network and have that pump the same accounts to windwos domain controller in samba and linux logins using the same mechanism.

Thanks for the reply - I'll google it. Just started preparing for rhce and step by step I want to go through everything including NIS.