Re: FreeBSD as NIS client to Linux

From: Michel Talon (talon_at_lpthe.jussieu.fr)
Date: 11/01/04 

Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 16:00:20 +0000 (UTC)

Stephan A. Rickauer <stephan@ini.phys.ethz.ch> wrote:
>
> Given your comments, I discovered the option "merge passwords" in yp's
> Makefile:
>
> # Should we merge the passwd file with the shadow file ?
> # MERGE_PASSWD=true|false
> MERGE_PASSWD=false
>
> Is that what you mean? The problem is, that the NIS server is already
> productive for Linux clients. How does that affect the current setup /
> will Linux clients still be able to get the maps?

In our lab (that i don't manage) there are almost only Linux clients,
so i can assure you it works very well. This change was made so that
my FreeBSD machine can use NIS, so far it does. This apparently causes
a security problem since /etc/shadow appears on the net, but whatever
the configuration, /etc/shadow will always end up on the wire, if you
think about it. This being said, my opinion is that NIS is an awful
way to solve the centralized passwd management problem. Since first time
i have seen yellow pages used, with old Sun machines, i have always seen
tons of problems NIS related. If the NIS server goes belly up, you can
say adios to all your machines. Everything freezes up solid. For some
years we used the solution of purely and simply copying the passwd files
from a server to all machines (you could do it now with rsync). This
solution is ways more robust. We had written a small daemon which
replicated the files to all machines as soon as something changed on the
central server, and a perl script which tuned the thing for each
architecture (/etc/shadow or not, etc.). This worked like a charm. But
our sysadm decided that this was not RedHat endorsed, and nuked
everything.

>
> Stephan 

-- 
Michel TALON

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