NIS Password Controls

[Michael Williams_6]

Dear all,

I've recently been trying to move away from our aging SCO NIS server and replace it with two cheap linux servers, to provide us with some redundancy (I can't believe how cheap those DL360's are!)

My problem is this, I want to use password aging and set minimum password lengths, which is nice and easy to do on our Windows domain, it looked as though I could do this in /etc/login.defs, but this appears to be a local file only and doesn't seem to apply to NIS.

Not only that, if a user changes their password on the NIS server, this password is only changed there, not on the NIS domain!

The howto's only tell you how to set it up and don't seem to mention such basic security mechanisms like password aging, does this exist with Linux NIS?

We're running SLES8 / UnitedLinux 1.0 at the moment, would prefer to make changes using Yast (to allow my Windows colleagues a chance) but more than happy to stick with CLI only!

Any help most appreciated!

Mike

[Steven E. Protter]

NIS might(I'm no expert) have a problem with user id and passwords that exceed 8 characters.

NIS solution: Set the settings for the local user on the NIS master server. Use yppush or whatever it is you use to push policy and data out to the NIS secondaries and you're done.

Better Solution: Use LDAP authentication. You can have a single window Linux LDAP server handle authentication for your entire network, including windows clients.

SEP

[Roberto Polli]

I'm with SEP for LDAP:
it's easy and you can use it for authenticating a lot of software.
for changing password in nis use
#yppasswd

For password length you can set it up via PAM
see /etc/pam.d/system-auth

I don't know if linux nis implements password aging, but nis is an old stuff. Use ldap.

Peace, R.