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

[Neeraj Arora]

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
Tel: +351 218440100   Fax: +351 218472167
-----------------------------------------------------

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