NIS NOVICE

[Nobody's Hero]

Can someone help me. I am going to try to set up a NIS server. I'm in the dark here, never tried this b4. Do I have to make sure that all my users on all my other systems have the same id number? (in passwd file). If I have to, is there an easy way to do this?

Thanks,
Bob

[S.K. Chan]

Attached is the process ..

[Corthouts Carlo]

Best is to give the users the same id on NIS as on the other systems.

This way you avoid problems with permissions on files they create.

If necessary on certain machines you give them other id's on local machines and change the lookup order for passwd in nsswitch.conf.

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Hi Robert,

The simple answer is yes but there are a few rules. On an NIS client, if a user is found in /etc/passwd before the '+' entry is found then the local passwd entry wins. In that case the uid could be different on different clients but that is not generally considered a desirable thing. The idea is that on all your clients the passwd file will be very sparse (root,lp,uucp, ...) with perhaps 10 total entries and then the '+' entry. You really need to rcp or ftp all you passwd files into a common directory and then look for duplicates. The thing you don't want is for uid 125 to be 'mmouse' on one client and 'dduck' on another. If you do have dupliucate uids then you are going to have to assign one of them a new uid and then use a find -exec to chown all the files from the old uid to the new uid.

It appears that you have some work to do.

Regards, Clay

[Nobody's Hero]

OK, sometimes I'm as sharp as a bowling ball.
John has accounts on 10 unix boxes. All his accounts have a different id#. Should I logon to each box and make sure his id number is the same accross the platform.

Thanks,
Bob

[S.K. Chan]

Sorry, didn't quite answer all your qs.

>Do I have to make sure that all my users on >all my other systems have the same id number? >(in passwd file). If I have to, is there an >easy way to do this?

Basically you need to consolidate all your UIDs from other systems, any clients that you want to be included in the NIS domain that you're about to setup has to have a unique UID. You could probably write a script to extract all the UIDs and make comparison and decide which UID to use in a case of duplicate ones.

[Nobody's Hero]

Thanks,
A.Clay. just the answer I was looking for.

Best Regards and Thanks.