Quoting Peter Ross (Peter.Ross@bogen.in-berlin.de):

AFAIK NetInfo has nothing to do with Sun.

Heh, OK. It sure felt like a mutant Sun invention, right down to the RPC portmapper dependency. (I was a NeXTStep admirer back in the day, and ran the Intel port for a while, though I never splurged on any of the very pretty black-cube systems.)

I still consider a lot of NeXT stuff as very good - and NetInfo was easier to handle as other /etc/files replacements (NIS, NIS+, LDAP) and came with a good set of GUI tools to edit NetInfo too.

Probably. It's been long enough since I had to administer NIS that the hate has faded. ;->