Perform Change On Multiple Workstations

[Peter_17]

Hi all,

Ive been doing SA for a few years, but in an environment of less than 20 machines. Now I'm in an environment with 200+ workstations and I'd like to change the root password on all of them. Any suggestions as to the best/most efficient way to accomplish this. HP-UX 10.2 on primarily the same subnet.

Thanks & HAGO,

Pete

[Kevin Wright]

unless your using NIS+, or plan to implement it, your out of luck..unless they are trusted hosts, you could write a script to remsh another box and change the passwd.

[Patrick Wallek]

You might look into rdist and see if this will help you. We do something similar on our Sun machines, but I am not sure exactly how it is set up.

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Networking/Admin/rdist-6.1.5/

[Jim Turner]

Peter,

Expect is your friend. We have an expect script called "pass_mass" that crawls all 62 of our boxes and strokes the root password before it expires each month.

(Shhh. Don't tell Information Security!)

Home:
http://expect.nist.gov/
Depot:
http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Tcl/expect-5.31/

Cheers,
Jim

[Shannon Petry]

As long as you dont have custom publickey files, then you can just rcp a password file from one host to another. You could setup a .rhosts file on all hosts, allowing access to the machines for the "admin" server, so that you wont have to issue a password on each. It is a bit safer than sending loose passwords over a network. You would not believe how easy it is to pick up a password from a telnet session.

If security is a bigger issue, then you could build and install OpenSSH on each of the systems, and ssh over instead. It allows a policy similar to .rhosts, and the full transmission is encrypted. However, if the password is sniffed off the net, it is no different that users being able to view the file, which any user with access hast to be able to do!

Regards,
Shannon