kpneal@pobox.com writes:

>authenticator program. This authenticator could be a single process
>running all the time or it could be a process that sends back a "yes"
>or "no" (along with other data, as needed -- Kerberos tickets, for example).

Say you're doing an "ls -l" on your typical pop3-mailspool, with a 1000
users.  This already takes 10-20secs if using NIS (over 100mbit),
and that's using library functions that communicate via IPC with the
server.
Starting a seperate program for uid/gid resolution each time would be
prohibitively expensive.

--mkb

P.S.: your header is broken:
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