NIS and mixing distros

[P Jones]

On 7/27/05, Peter Arremann <loony at loonybin.org> wrote:
> On Wednesday 27 July 2005 21:50, P Jones wrote:
> > Hi all;
> >
> > I have a Centos 4.1 server and three FC4 workstations in my little
> > network. I just started using NIS for authentication and NFS for /home
> > serving. For fun I did a quick Ubuntu install on one machine, and ran
> > into the wall when it came to differences between groups/GIDs.

> *nods* Yeah - good luck with that... We have it even worse - we got HP-UX,
> Solaris, AIX and Linux in different versions everywhere... Most people wonder
> why when they first log into their Linux box, their user ID shows up as
> "games" :-D
> Anyway - the solution is easy... there is none. Either you mod the groups on
> your client or you find another way to work around your issue...

Hi Peter;

Well that actually makes me feel better. At least I'm not the only one.
 
> > Another very wierd thing was that before I was using NIS and just
> > using NFS for /home, even if I set UIDs and usernames and GIDs and
> > group names to be the same on the Centos server and the Ubuntu
> > workstation, the Ubuntu machine couldn't get access to some
> > directories I was attempting to share with NFS. Then I switched on NIS
> > and they worked.

> Now, that's one thing that shouldn't happen... There must have been something
> else set wrong... hosts maybe?

I don't do anything that isn't automatic with hosts on my home
network, which is the one I'm talking about. I have a few groups,
docs, download, storage, music, with GIDs 5100, 5101, 5102, 5103
respectively. The docs directory is a shared directory that I have in
/home/docs and the other groups correspond to directories under
/mnt/6B200PO . The docs directory was always available, I didn't have
any problem with that one. The other three were the problem. In fact,
if I changed the GID of any one of those directories to the GID of
docs, then they became available. And yes, I was in all four groups on
the server and on the client machine (before using NIS). The
directories were owned by root permissions were set at 2770. If I
changed the permissions to 2777, then they were available. And again,
I had made sure that UIDs and GIDs for users were the same on both
server and client (I generally start at 5000 for UIDs and leave GIDs
at 500 in RH fashion), and that the directory GIDs were the same on
both. This is repeatable too, although I've gone back to FC4 on my
machine. What do you think?

-P