As mentioned earlier , we have a fileserverinfrastructure and so we need some way of propagating account andpassword information around (and letting people actually update theirpasswords). The old traditional answer is NIS, the new traditionalanswer is LDAP, and we don't really like either so we wrote our own.

Given the the Unix system UID problem , anysuch system has three parts: where each machine's account informationlives, how global account information propagates around, and how youcombine global accounts and system accounts