uid administration

[David Collier-Brown]

ddk at lanl.gov (David D Kaas) writes:
>	We now administer the user-names/uids across the machines
>manually but would like to centralize this.  We would also like
>to add to this control of hostnames, ip addreses, NQS host names etc..
>We know of yellow pages but have heard that it has some security holes.
>What is available?  What do other sites use?

  NFS-mount critical/shared files.  This has the following tradeoffs...

advantages: it's 
	substantially faster
	very visible (ie, you do a mount and see where something comes from)
	reliable
	secure as nfs (which isn't anything to write home about...)
	widely supported (much more than yellow pages)
disadvantages: it's
	a single point of failure (fallback is easy, though)
	dependant on NFS semantices (not unix semantics), and
	necessary to write your own passwd/chsh/chfn/mkuser

--dave
	
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