Modern UNIX applications (ie anything debian is willing to include) never read directly from /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow. Instead, they use a set of api functions in glibc. In turn, glibc provides a way to swap in new modules, (libnss-$FOO.so) to provide modular access to the information normally contained in /etc/passwd. This is the same mechanism used by NIS.
I would like to install libnss-ptdb, which eliminates the headache of manually synchronizing /etc/passwd and the AFS PTS server. In particular, it avoids the risk of mismatched numeric userids. http://www.openafs.org/pipermail/openafs-info/2007-March/025659.html I've been running this on my own servers for a week, and it's great stuff. You can have an (almost) empty /etc/passwd, yet chown/chgrp still work properly and you see AFS usernames when you do "ls -l". - a -- PGP/GPG: 5C9F F366 C9CF 2145 E770 B1B8 EFB1 462D A146 C380 _______________________________________________ HCoop-SysAdmin mailing list [email protected] http://hcoop.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hcoop-sysadmin
