Xref: utzoo comp.unix.questions:20506 comp.unix.wizards:20940
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!ists!yunexus!davecb
From: davecb@yunexus.UUCP (David Collier-Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: uid administration
Keywords: uid administration yellow pages
Message-ID: <8526@yunexus.UUCP>
Date: 9 Mar 90 13:43:06 GMT
References: <45475@lanl.gov>
Organization: York U. Computing Services
Lines: 27

ddk@lanl.gov (David D Kaas) writes:
>	We now administer the user-names/uids across the machines
>manually but would like to centralize this.  We would also like
>to add to this control of hostnames, ip addreses, NQS host names etc..
>We know of yellow pages but have heard that it has some security holes.
>What is available?  What do other sites use?

  NFS-mount critical/shared files.  This has the following tradeoffs...

advantages: it's 
	substantially faster
	very visible (ie, you do a mount and see where something comes from)
	reliable
	secure as nfs (which isn't anything to write home about...)
	widely supported (much more than yellow pages)
disadvantages: it's
	a single point of failure (fallback is easy, though)
	dependant on NFS semantices (not unix semantics), and
	necessary to write your own passwd/chsh/chfn/mkuser

--dave
	
-- 
David Collier-Brown,  | davecb@yunexus, ...!yunexus!davecb or
72 Abitibi Ave.,      | {toronto area...}lethe!dave 
Willowdale, Ontario,  | Joyce C-B:
CANADA. 416-223-8968  |    He's so smart he's dumb.