Date: Mon, 23 Feb 1998 20:17:47 +0100 From: Andreas Klemm <andreas@klemm.gtn.com> To: isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: What if "vipw" and "pw useradd" work concurrently ? 3000 POP users, how ? Message-ID: <19980223201747.23348@klemm.gtn.com>
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I'm currently thinking about how to deal with about 3000 pop3 or imap
users. I'm currently adding 5000 local users onto my machine. Just for
curiosity ;-) Well, never had to deal with such a huge number of users ;-)
NTW: After about 500 users the pw useradd script is really getting slower
and slower ;-)
Well, then I thought, ok, what might happen, if the system is creating
users automatically and then some root user decides to manually finetune
passwd using vipw.
Well, I get some "holes" in the passwd files (some pop users
were missing) and the pw useradd script tells me:
root{165} ~ time ./mkuser
pw: user 'pop1962' disappeared during update
pw: user 'pop1967' disappeared during update
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This seems to be a race condition. I think /etc/master.passwd is
locked and the pw useradd utility can't work ...
Perhaps this race condition is easily manageable by saying, if
something like "pw useradd" is running "don't do that" ;-)
But a collegue and I are currently thinking about making admin
frontends for adding pop users to a POP server which get user data
from a database and you don't know, when there is such a utility
running.
So ... never more administration via "vipw" if such scripts are
running ??? What are your experiences ?
BTW, what solution would you recommend if you have to deal
with about 3000-4000 pop users ???
How many pop user would you put onto a single machine ???
FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris 2.x machines (Ultra SPARC) are
available.
Another thing, "authentication" !
BSDI has the possibility to authenticate users using the
Radius protocol...
What would be the best solution in a larger user environment,
to deal with some thousand users ? (Mainly pop accounts and
some www/ftp accounts) ?
How would you handle incoming mailboxes ? One /var/mail/LOGINNAME
is certainly not sufficient ...
Would you use a central NIS Server for user authentication over
several machines ? I think no other way .... or ?!
What about Quotas ? Is quota mechanism fast enough, to distinguish
sme thousand users fast enough ???
Or would you create some machines pop1, pop2, pop3..popn
for every new 1000 pop users ?
Need some good ideas ;-) Is there a good source of information
(book, FAQ, ...) for such large installations ?
Thanks
Andreas ///
--
Andreas Klemm
powered by ,,symmetric multiprocessor FreeBSD''
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