NIS

[Chern Jian Leaw]

If I were to modify only a user's uid in the passwd file of the NIS master server, would this change be updated to its NIS client machines and NIS slave servers ?

Also, if this change gets updated everywhere within a NIS domain, would this matter result in access problems when accessing the filesystems ?

I did not test this scenario yet as I was not sure if it could result in user access problems to the system, once passwd file is modified.

Is there a way to perform this test safely & surely of modifying the uid in the passwd file, or some other methods, perhaps??

[John Carr_2]

Hi Chern

If you change the UID on the master and rebuild the maps they will be pushed out to the rest ot the network.

This will not chnage the UID associated with the files on the system. To align them you would need to do something like:

find . -user "1700" -exec chown newUID {} \;

I would test this first by creating a few files in the tmp directory and executing the command then doing an ls -l to check whats taken place.



John.

[Patrick Wallek]

If you change the UID for a user, you most certainly will have problems access things. The user's home directory will be effected, as will any files they owned outside of their home directory.

You must remember that unix stores ownership and group information for a file by the numeric UID and GID values, and then when you do an 'ls -l' or something similar, it goes to the passwd file or group file and figures out which user / group belongs to the UID / GID.

Changing a UID, or a GID, can have unknown effects since it is often difficult to know precisely which files a user may somehow own.

[PIYUSH D. PATEL]

Hi,

Once you update UID on the NIS server, the changes will be pushed on to the slave servers also.

But after changing the UID, the user will not be able to access the files created by him in his group or any other group.

So be careful and dont change the UID.

Piyush