Name Service Switch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia operating systems, the Name Service Switch (NSS) allows replacement of many Unix configuration files (for example: /etc/passwd, /etc/group, /etc/hosts) with one or more centralized databases; it also offers configurable mechanisms for accessing those databases. (Earlier Unix-like systems, with the notable exception of Ultrix, either accessed only the configuration files or had hard-coded rules for which files or databases to access; Ultrix offered nearly identical functionality to the Name Service Switch, using the configuration file /etc/svc.conf.) Sun Microsystems first developed NSS for their Solaris operating system, but subsequently programmers ported it to many other operating systems including FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux, HP-UX, IRIX and AIX. in Public bookmarkswith ldapldaplinks2ldapwikipedianss