Separate password files on diskless boxes?

[Milan Obuch]

On Monday 17 October 2005 15:42, Michael W. Lucas wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm using nanobsd.sh on 6.0RC to provide a small world for diskless
> boxes.  These are for small single-purpose machines -- i.e., DNS
> server, FTP server, etc, served off read-only NFS.  Nothing exciting
> there, it just works.
>
> The last problem I'm having is the password file.  I need to assign
> separate password files to each, and separate root passwords on each
> diskless station.  The problem, of course, is the MFS /etc, so changes
> are not permanent.
>
> Is there any way to make passwd(1) talk to a different password file?
> I really don't want to use read/write mounts on my NFS server.  Or,
> has anyone come up with a clever way to do this?  All the tutorials in
> Google talk about using the server's password file, which I
> specifically don't want to do...
>
> Thanks!
>

You could install separate file when you create MFS filesystem. We solve 
similar issue with script saving changed /etc/master.passwd elsewhere.
This file is read when booting.

Regards,
Milan