From owner-freebsd-isp Sun Apr 20 12:22:55 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id MAA07801 for isp-outgoing; Sun, 20 Apr 1997 12:22:55 -0700 (PDT) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.50]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id MAA07796; Sun, 20 Apr 1997 12:22:51 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id MAA08341; Sun, 20 Apr 1997 12:20:45 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199704201920.MAA08341@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: Need a common passwd file among machines To: vinay@agni.nuko.com (Vinay Bannai) Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 12:20:45 -0700 (MST) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, freebsd-isp@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199704200512.WAA16052@agni.nuko.com> from "Vinay Bannai" at Apr 19, 97 10:12:54 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-isp@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > I need a common passwd file that is shared by a FreeBSD machine, Linux > machine, Solaris and a SunOS machine. I do not want to use NIS. Er, how about "YP". 8-) 8-). Alternately, you could download the LDAP or X.500 stuff, and hope it's not too green to work. 8-(. > I thought of using rdist to distribute the passwd file among all these > machines but could not because some of them use shadow passwd files and > others don't. Also, I am not sure the passwd encryption is the same on all > these platforms. If the password encryption is not the same on all the platforms, you can replace the authentication mechanism. A good place to look to check this (assuming X runs on all the platforms) is in the xdm sources form ftp.x.org. It will list and categorize the machine differences. Most likely, if you install the DES packages for the various platforms, they will all be using DES. Note that rdist will stomp password changes from the central server, so unless your users log into the central server (and potentially end up sending passwords in clear-text to the password change command on the server), the password changes will not "stick". This can be a real pain with an rdist-like system. > More generally, the reason I am using this approach is to make the > developement of code easier by using cvs. I have one machine exporting the > cvs source tree and others mount it. To keep the same uids, I need to > share the passwd files. Does anyone have a better suggestions? If you are in a zone where you are trusting NFS mounts, then you are in a zone where you can probably trust NIS. In either case, you will need a common authentication algorithm between all the machines, and that will probably be DES, if any of the machines are commercial platforms. Regards, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.