Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!cucstud!aucis!bnick From: bnick@aucis.UUCP (Bill Nickless) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: Alternatives for Yellow Pages? Summary: Another approach; not as effecient but no source necessary, using an RFS system. Message-ID: <124@aucis.UUCP> Date: 10 Jan 89 13:34:21 GMT References: <6999@pyr.gatech.EDU> <747@genie.UUCP> Lines: 50 In article <747@genie.UUCP>, scooter@genie.UUCP (Scooter Morris) writes: > From article <6999@pyr.gatech.EDU>, by david@pyr.gatech.EDU (David Brown): > > Hi. Over the past several months, I've read several articles from > > SysAdmins who said that they didn't use Yellow Pages on their networks. > > I can understand this: we use yp and it's a real pain sometimes. 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). > > So, we modified /bin/passwd so that insted of updating the > password database directly, it sends a packet to a password > daemon. [ Description of solution deleted ] > P.S. This stuff is available to anyone who wants it, but > you'll need source to take advantage of it because of the > changes to /bin/passwd. At our installation, we run 2 AT&T 3B2/400's with an RFS link set up between them. Unfortunately (?) we don't have a source license here, so we have to make do with the binaries. The first step was to restrict /bin/passwd (chmod o-rx /bin/passwd). Then we created a simple program to act as a front-end to /bin/passwd, with a set-gid to sys (or whatever the group of /bin/passwd is). We installed this as /usr/local/bin/passwd. This front end traps SIGQUIT and SIGINT, creates a lockfile in a common place in the RFS domain, and executes /bin/passwd as a child process with the same argument that the front end was called with. When /bin/passwd returns, it copies /etc/passwd to the remote sites using chmod and /bin/cp. Problems include: 1. Only one person, domain-wide, can change their password at a time. This can cause significant delays because many people wait for the "Enter new password:" prompt before thinking one up! 2. Password aging probably can't be used, because I suspect login expects to execute /bin/passwd to change passwords. 3. /etc/passwd has to be copied to all the other machines. Good luck! -- William (Bill) Kirk Nickless Andrews University 305 Meier Computer and Information Science Department Berrien Springs, MI 49104 UNIX Support Group (616) 471-6515 or (616) 471-3422 ...!uunet!cucstud!aucis!bnick