Separate password files on diskless boxes?

[Michael W. Lucas]

On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 08:46:34PM +0200, Marco Molteni wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Oct 2005 09:42:57 -0400
> "Michael W. Lucas" <mwlucas at blackhelicopters.org> wrote:
> 
> > 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...
> 
> you can use the /conf override directory as explained in
> man diskless:
> 
> /conf/default/10.0.0.1/etc/master.passwd
> /conf/default/10.0.0.1/etc/passwd
> 
> /conf/default/10.0.0.2/etc/master.passwd
> /conf/default/10.0.0.2/etc/passwd

Yes, but on boot /etc/ is a MFS.

I can change the password, but on the next boot it reverts back to
whatever's saved on the hard drive.

I'd like to avoid doing kerberos or NIS for half a dozen little boxes,
but if that's the only choice that's what I'll have to do.


-- 
Michael W. Lucas	mwlucas at FreeBSD.org, mwlucas at BlackHelicopters.org
		http://www.BlackHelicopters.org/~mwlucas/

"The cloak of anonymity protects me from the nuisance of caring." -Non Sequitur