Martin, I'm maintaining my own NIS server. I can't answer all of your questions, but I'll try.
Basically, your client machines will have all of your system accounts set up already. There's no purpose in remotely authenticating them. So the /var/yp/passwd would be more of a filter with the intent of restricting authentication to just those users. I haven't tried changing the password, so I don't know how that works yet. I would think that it propogates back. It's not an issue though because it's easy to refresh the YP tables. You have to do that anyway when you add a user. You add a user normally to the NIS server, then do another "make" on the yp configuration. The next time the client needs to authenticate, it will be there. If you find out more answers to your questions, please post them. Thanks, John On Sun, 2004-12-12 at 23:11, Martin Glazer wrote: > Hey All, > > I've taken over the maintenance of a linux network using NIS for it's > authentication. As I have never used NIS extensively before, I have a few > questions which I'm hoping someone can help with. > > The machines are all running Mandake (9.2 and 10.1) if that makes any > difference. > > NIS appears to be working as people can login to any machine, so I'm more > concerned about the ongoing maintenance and setting up new users. > > Here's what I'm trying to figure out after reading the NIS howto. > > 1. On the NIS server, there is the regular /etc/passwd file as well as > a /var/yp/passwd. From my understanding these should basically be the same, > but they are not. The /var/yp/passwd file does not contain all the users or > some of the userid's have different usernames. Should these be the same? > > 2. If, on the server, I do a ypcat -h localhost passwd, I get the listing of > all the users from the /etc/passwd file and not the /var/yp/passwd file. Does > this mean the users are being authenticated against the regular passwd file > and if so, what is the use of the /var/yp/passwd? > > 3. As root is listed in the result of ypcat -h localhost passwd, does this > mean that on the client machines, there is a centrel root user as well? How > does this relate to the client's local root account? Which takes precedence? > > 4. How does one change a password? Can one just run the regular passwd > command > on a client machine and it will update the server? > > 5. Can I use the regular useradd command to add users? > > I'm sure I'm going to have more questions about this, so can anyone recommend > any other good links? > > Thanks > > Martin > > _______________________________________________ > clug-talk mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca > Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) > **Please remove these lines when replying _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
