Setting up LDAP or NIS on a cluster

[Andrew Kaplan]

Hi there --

I have a cluster of servers set up where the main system, a.k.a system used to access the cluster, has two NIC's and the others have one. The server with the two NIC's has an address on eth0 that is a part of the department network while the address on eth1 has a private network address specific to the cluster. The other servers in the cluster each have a private address on their respective eth0 NIC's.

I would like to set up user accounts that would be used exclusively within the cluster. There are two approaches that I had in mind:

The first was to set up an LDAP server on the main computer and the appropriate client software on the other nodes.
The second was to set up an NIS master server on the main computer and the appropriate client software on the other nodes.

There is one caveat to this situation. The main server is currently, and must remain, a NIS client on an existing domain that is present on the department network.

The questions I have are the following:
Is it possible to set up and LDAP or NIS server on an existing NIS client without detriment to the server or the NIS domain?

If the above holds true, which type of server would be the better way to go?

[Ivan Ferreira]

I would use an LDAP server, and configure at least one slave server. You could setup the ldap server on the "real servers" or cluster servers and configure the systems to be ldap clients. In this way, you won't modify the current NIS client configuration of any system, you will just stack another authentication module.

[Bill Thorsteinson]

Use pam_unix2 on the server and you can
configure multiple authentication sources.
NIS, LDAP, and files.

Alternatively, you can uses cfengine or rsync,
to copy the files /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow
from the main system to the rest of the
cluster. This would allow you to use NIS
and files.

If you are running a cluster, then I would
expect you to consider cfengine and rsync
as part of your cluster configuration tools.