I used NIS back in my Solaris days too. The important thing that NIS provides (really any centralized authentication) for a Linux based network is common user/group id numbers (UID/GID) for the various users. NFS depends upon this. NIS is just something more to learn. For my home network I don't use it however. I only have to keep track of a few users UID/GID so I do it manually. Of course I am user 1000 and my wife is 1001. The tricky part is the GID (group ID's). Ubuntu just uses the next available GID if you don't explicitly state the GID for any group.
Let me state that in a different way. Use a common users and group when you share data between machines and possibly users with NFS.
As you can see it is more to it than just sharing one machines /home directory.
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