Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 20:24:23 +0530 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Nathan Vidican <webmaster@wmptl.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Some NIS questions... Message-ID: <20000428202423.A818@physics.iisc.ernet.in> In-Reply-To: <39098D74.5A38FEEE@wmptl.com>; from webmaster@wmptl.com on Fri, Apr 28, 2000 at 09:09:08AM -0400 References: <39098D74.5A38FEEE@wmptl.com>
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Nathan Vidican said on Apr 28, 2000 at 09:09:08: > Please correct me if I'm wrong, but using NIS services I can make the > following example work (no?): > > FreeBSD Box 1: > -runs as primary NIS server > -exports parent dir of homedirs for all users via NFS > > FreeBSD Box 2/3/4/5/6/7: > -authenticates users using NIS instead of /etc/passwd > -has parent dir of home-dir's for users mounted over NFS > > Essentially what I'd like to do is maintain a single /etc/passwd file, > allowing all machines to share the same user/group database; hence our > radius clients, and our webhosting clients, and our mail-server's > clients can all route to a single username. NIS/NFS is fine for sharing users and passwords. But mail service can be unreliable unless hosted on the NIS/NFS server. (Otherwise, eg if the connection is temporarily down, mail to an NIS client will bounce saying "no such user".) There may be other catches too. If your NIS server goes temporarily offline, for instance, all the clients will have problems. For how to set it up, you need to export the home filesystem over NFS (see the NFS manpage), configure the host machine, run ypserv on the host machine, configure the client machines (you need a file /etc/yp.conf and special entries to the password, group and hosts files), and run ypbind on the client machines. ypserv and ypbind can be run on boot-up by putting entries in /etc/rc.conf. More details in the manpage for nis / ypserv / ypbind, which you should read carefully even if you find a good tutorial. As for tutorials, I've seen a good one somewhere for FreeBSD but lost the location: try a web search. There's on on http://freebsd.peon.net which I haven't read carefully. You can also try the linux NIS howto (http://linuxdoc.org), but don't follow it literally, read it only to get the general idea. Rahul. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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