Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!husc6!bbn!ulowell!hawk.ulowell.edu!arosen From: arosen@hawk.ulowell.edu (MFHorn) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: Alternatives for Yellow Pages? Keywords: yp yellow pages Message-ID: <11084@swan.ulowell.edu> Date: 4 Jan 89 21:09:10 GMT References: <6999@pyr.gatech.EDU> Sender: news@swan.ulowell.edu Reply-To: arosen@hawk.ulowell.edu Lines: 34 > What > are some alternate ways to get similar effects? (I want user x to be able > to use his same username and password on all our machines, and when he > changes it on any machine, I want that change propagated to all the > others). We have our central server periodically (every two hours, via cron) copy /etc/passwd, /etc/group and /etc/hosts to a list of hosts. It's pretty slow, and it's very inefficient, but it works. The shell script that does it mounts the remote host's /, copies the files over and then runs a script located on the remote machine (if the script exists). This second script is used to add host specific stuff to any of the files copied over. Eg., one of the hosts supports several diskless workstations, so it has a script to copy the files into the diskless partition. All the scripts do as thorough error checking as possible. One thing they don't do is check if the file has changed before copying it. Rdist may be better, but I couldn't get it to work they way I wanted it. The big things that you lose out on are a hashed host table (for those without a named), netgroups (/etc/exports can get pretty big) and yppasswd (chaning your password on any machine but the central server is meaningless). This is probably an unacceptable solution for very large networks; we have about 15 hosts to update, but I can send our shell scripts to whoever wants them. -- Andy Rosen | arosen@hawk.ulowell.edu | "I got this guitar and I ULowell, Box #3031 | ulowell!arosen | learned how to make it Lowell, Ma 01854 | | talk" -Thunder Road RD in '88 - The way it should've been