Even lighter weight directory protocol?

[Alan Somers]

On Thu, Dec 29, 2016 at 1:44 PM, George Mitchell <george+freebsd at m5p.com> wrote:
> I use NIS to propagate /etc/passwd and /etc/group, and really nothing
> else.  I have been thinking about shifting to LDAP, to avoid some of
> the really embarrassing failure modes of NIS, except that I would like
> to kill the sadist who named this a "lightweight" protocol.  I've
> thought about a simple cron/rsync job (and maybe that's what I'll do
> in the end).  But are there any other directory-ish systems out there
> that are, let's say, bantamweight or flyweight?             -- George

Many years ago I used cfengine to sync /etc/password and similar
files.  But it's really not as good as a real directory protocol.  For
one thing, users can only change their passwords on the master server.
NIS is better.  I'm afraid I don't know of any alternatives that
aren't NIS or LDAP.  KRB5 is good, but it only handles authentication,
so it generally has to be paired with either NIS or LDAP.

-Alan