Sincronize /etc/passwd and /etc/yp/passwd.master

[Ângelo Rodrigues]

Hi,

I think you have made a series confusion!!! I don't want to use any file 
server, I just want to use a centralized system of login/password.
Please, read all messages to understand all point.

Regards,

On Tuesday 29 April 2003 10:31, Neeraj Arora wrote:
> Please refer to the email below (that I am replying to) before reading what
> I write...
>
> /var/yp/master.passwd is not to be a softlink or symbolic link to
> /etc/master.passwd According the documentation (handbook I think),
> /var/yp/master.passwd is a copy of /etc/master.passwd without the root,
> system and one user who is also the member of group wheel.
>
> One can use amd (automount daemon) to have all users have their home
> directories in /home, while the directories inside /home are themselves
> mounted when needed according to the amd map supplied by nis. On the
> fileserver or the nfs server system, one could have different directories
> for different machines depending on any one or a combination of the
> os/hostname/ipaddress/network/etc. of the mounting machine.
>
> So if the fileserver had /allhomedirs and in that had ./linux, and
> ./freebsd and in each of them ./tom ./dick and ./harry; a linux client
> would end up providing /allhomedirs/linux/<user> at /home/<user> while a
> freebsd client would do the same by providing /allhomedirs/freebsd/<user>
> at /home/<user>.
>
> This will allow the entries in the /var/yp/master.passwd and /var/yp/passwd
> to remain untouched when produced as nis maps for different clients/hosts.
> Same can be done by mounting the appropriate shell binary from a fileserver
> using amd maps while the path for the shell can still remain only
> /path/shell or /usr/local/bin/bash; for linux clients the
> /usr/local/whatever is mounted from /allusrlocaldirs/linux/whatever and for
> freebsd it is mounted from /allusrlocaldirs/freebsd/whatever.
>
> One might not need to overwrite any field produced by nis on a client
> machine.
>
> Personally I feel, the less the configuration differences in different
> client machines, the better.
>
> Hope I havent got off the point completely...:-\
>
> Regards,
> Neeraj
>
> >>> Ângelo Rodrigues <amr at fccn.pt> 04/29/03 20:08 PM >>>
>
> On Monday 28 April 2003 17:39, Dan Nelson wrote:
> > In the last episode (Apr 28), ^Angelo Rodrigues said:
> > > On Monday 28 April 2003 16:22, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> > > > On Mon, Apr 28, 2003 at 05:06:36PM +0000, ^Angelo Rodrigues wrote:
> > > > > On Monday 28 April 2003 15:48, Dan Nelson wrote:
> > > > > > You want the same password; why wouldn't you want the same
> > > > > > homedir and shell also?  All our NIS users have their homedir
> > > > > > set to /net/homedirmachine/home/username.
> > > > >
> > > > > But my server users are distributed betwen /home and /homeapp and
> > > > > this method will force the same thing in the clients.
> > > >
> > > > You can selectively override part of a NIS password database entry
> > > > by using NIS magic tokens in the local passwd file --- see
> > > > passwd(5). For instance, user 'fred' might have home directory
> > > > /home/fred in the NIS database, but you can override that in a
> > > > client machine to /users/fred by putting:
> > > >
> > > >     +fred::::::::/users/fred:
> > > >
> > > > into /etc/master.passwd on the client.  All of the other fields are
> > > > inherited from the NIS database.
> > >
> > > This could be a solution :)
> >
> > Standardizing the name of the homedir would make your job a lot easier.
> > Can you make symlinks in /home so that every user whose homedir is in
> > /homeapp can use /home/user also?  Then the user's home is
> > "/home/user" no matter what machine he logs into.
>
> But there's still a little problem... As the /var/yp/master.passwd is a
> softlink to /etc/master.passwd, the server's root user will be the same
> in the client so, the client won't have any local user. This can cause
> some series problems when the network is down. The client machine
> should have at least some local users to avoid this kind of problem.
>
> Regards,

-- 

Ângelo Rodrigues - amr at fccn.pt 
FCCN - Fundação para a Computação Científica Nacional
Av. Brasil, 101  1700-066 Lisboa - Portugal
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