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From: mascio@math-cs.kent.edu (John R. S. Mascio)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: uid administration
Keywords: uid administration yellow pages
Message-ID: <1990Mar9.141637.22366@math-cs.kent.edu>
Date: 9 Mar 90 14:16:37 GMT
References: <45475@lanl.gov>
Sender: news@math-cs.kent.edu (News)
Reply-To: mascio@math-cs.kent.edu (John R. S. Mascio)
Organization: Department of Computer Science, Kent State University
Lines: 30

Here at Kent State University, we have a simiular problem with uid
administration
(locally known as "the !@#$% networked password file!")  We have the
password file
distributed about once an hour via rcp in crontab by the local machines.  This
way the local macine is responsible for updating itself.  If it crashes,
the rest
of the net is (relativly) unaffected.  The crashed machine will update
itself when
it comes back up.

The master host runs a daemon to handle passwd/chsh/chfn requests.  When
a user on a machine runs passwd/chsh/chfn, they are running a client frontend
which goes through all the motions of the originals, but then passes the
info to the daemon on the master host and lets the daemon worry about the
actuall change to the file.

At the moment, I am about half done with it.  I need to secure the data
transmissions better and insure against daemon crashes.  If you may be
interested
contact me at "mascio@cs.kent.edu".  I hope this helps.

JRSM

--- 

John Raymond Stone Mascio (mascio@cs.kent.edu)
KSU Department of Math/CS, KSU
Merrill Hall  Kent, Ohio 44242 USA
Bus # (216) 672-2077 / 672-2430