Symbolic user names and RFS

[Wayne Power]

Dif'rent strokes...  We have maintained the same username/uid/gid and group
membership mapping on our four vaxen for two years.  Dump and tar tapes can be
read on any machine without a find . -exec chown follow up.  The ability to
move users and groups of users around without worrying about the uid stuff
made it well worth our while to whop up the utilities to maintain the password
and group files, add users and do all that good administrative stuff.

Now enter RFS.  The server builds tables of all the passwd and group files
from all the machines to which it is providing service as well as every
~user/.rhost it can find on the local machine.  If all our users used
~/.rhosts, each instance of the server would be over 400K.  We could not use
RFS under these conditions.  (Can you say "out of swap space"? :-)  By doing
away with these tables, each server is now about 90K.  Startup is much faster
as well.  I will make these changes available to anyone who wants them after I
run them by toddb.

I can't help but chuckle a bit when I read about the ls -l and chown problems.
Maintaining the uid/gid mapping seems to be the easiest fix.  Admittedly, this
can be a real pain in the ass to implement on systems that have lived as
separate entities under different administration for a while.  Good luck to
you folk.

If anybody is interested in our passwd/group maintenance stuff, please send me
e-mail.

--wmp   Wayne Power
        Automatix Inc.
        Billerica, MA
        vaxine!wmp