Hello Managers,
I'd like to thank Ettore Aldrovandi, Graham Van Epps, Werner Rost,
Christian Biache, Lucio Chiappetti, Michael Whittaker,
sysadmin_at_astro.su.se, Thierry Chich, and Pat O' Brien for their
responses.
Just about everyone suggested including NFS from one machine to mount
everyone's home directories. I neglected to mention in my original post
that we had plans in the coming months to use one of our machines with a
substantial RAID to do this.
Many people suggested ways of aliasing or symlinking yppasswd to
passwd. Also I was told that if users do not have an entry in the
/etc/passwd file, chsh will correctly edit the passwd on the NIS master.
I've gotten many more details from several generous people. It's mostly
settled my mind about some of the difficulties of rolling out NIS/NFS,
but I realize I need to do more planning.
Thanks everyone.
Kevin
[Original post]
> We've recently migrated some of our Tru64 servers into an NIS
> environment with a dedicated master. As we begin to use it more, I was
> wondering how we can keep this fairly transparent to users, and to
> administrators. For users, for example, I noticed that they cannot
> easily use 'chsh' to modify their shell choice. Obviously, they should
> use 'yppasswd' rather than 'passwd'. I am sure I will notice more and
> more environmental differences in NIS from
> non-NIS in userland.
>
> >From an administrator's point of view, to add users requires many more
> steps: I edit the passwd from from /var/yp/src, use 'passwd' to add a
> password, make the maps and distribute it, then go into each NIS client
> and create a home directory, for _each_ machine. With a little time, I
> can write a script to do it all with one tool. But I have a nagging
> feeling, this is not the right way to approach this, and I'm probably
> going to end up reinventing the wheel. Besides, NIS is supposed to
> simplify management.
>
> My question is, is there a generally accepted standard method to keeping
> NIS fairly transparent? Are there tools and utilities to keep mundane
> task manageable? I admit, I'm quite a newbie when it comes to NIS, I
> have and read some of the O'Reilly book "Managing NFS and NIS", but I
> don't feel it's answering my questions, are there better books to help
> me?
--
Kevin Dea
UNIX System Administrator
Alpine Electronics Research of America
Received on Fri Mar 30 2001 - 23:55:47 NZST