NFS - some success

[Rick Stevens]

brad.mugleston at comcast.net wrote:
> Rick and Gerry,
> 
> 
>>>
>>>Ah, welcome to the wonderful world of network administration.  That problem
>>>has been around for a long time.  And there's a solution.  It's
>>>called "NIS" (network information system), formerly known as "yp"
>>>(yellow pages--which is why many of its programs are still called
>>>"yp-something" such as "ypinit").
>>>
>>>NIS was designed so all systems can have a consistent view of the
>>>passwords, home directories, etc.  If you don't need the ability to
>>>mount a user's home directory over NFS when they log into a client machine
>>>or any of the other "fancy" stuff NIS can do, then you could use
>>>LDAP instead as a simple passwd/group/shadow replacement.  In fact, many
>>>NIS implementations now use LDAP instead of the older method of using
>>>flat files to hold its maps and such.
>>>
>>>By the way, Microsoft ADS (active directory service) is Microsoft's name
>>>for LDAP.  They add a few ornaments to it, but it's LDAP.  Why the h*ll
>>>can't they just use standard terminology?  Oh, yeah.  Then they couldn't
>>>charge $800 for it.  Grrrr!
>>>
>>>
>>>>As the server is new I need all the users from the client setup
>>>>on the server.
>>>>
>>>>While I work on that I've got 10+ Gig of mp3's and ogg files to
>>>>move from various machines to my server.
>>>
>>>
>>>You can set up an NIS server on the NFS server, then make sure all users
>>>are in its maps.  By users, I mean non-system accounts such as root,
>>>bin, etc.--essentially accounts with an UID/GID >= 100.  Then you set up
>>>each client machine to be an NIS client and modify /etc/nsswitch.conf to
>>>also use NIS.  You probably should grab a book on NIS as well.
>>>O'Reilly's "Managing NFS and NIS" by Stern would be a good place to
>>>start.  Remember that NIS
>>
>>Oops!  Incomplete editing on that.  Ignore "Remember that NIS" bit.
>>
>>
>>>Alternately, you could set up LDAP on the NFS server and make the other
>>>machines LDAP clients.  It's similar to setting up NIS, but the
>>>components are a bit different.  There's a HOWTO on it on the Linux
>>>Documentation Project site.
>>
>>----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> Thanks, I think I'll get in to the "WORK" part of NIS and maybe
> LDAP soo, when things at work slow down but for now how do I go
> about getting all my users and their passwords on my server?
> 
> Do I need to enter them one at at time - having them type in
> their passwords or can I copy and paste something from the
> clinent machine to the server machine to get them working
> together?

Just copy the appropriate bits from the client machines' /etc/passwd,
/etc/group and /etc/shadow files to the corresponding files on the
server.  You will need to make sure the UIDs and GIDs are consistent
across ALL machines or grant "o+rwx" access to the directories and
files on the NFS shares on the server (not particularly secure).
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-            We look for things.  Things that make us go!            -
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