NIS and mixing distros

P Jones deerfieldtech at gmail.com
Thu Jul 28 10:32:05 UTC 2005


On 7/28/05, Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-07-27 at 22:08 -0400, Peter Arremann 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. 
> 
> We have RHL9, RHEL3, RHEL4, FC1, FC3, FC4, HP-UX and Solaris boxes at
> $WORKPLACE all using the same NIS. The way we do it is to use NIS only
> for regular user accounts, and we use UIDs >= 1000 for this. We use
> separate files /etc/passwd.nis and /etc/group.nis on the NIS master
> server (HP-UX) rather than its own /etc/passwd and /etc/group to create
> the NIS databases. This is done by modifying the Makefile on the NIS
> master server.
> 
> So each client uses its own UIDs for system accounts (< UID 1000) and
> NIS for user accounts. Works fine.

Hi Paul;

But what do you do in the case of hardware on the client being in a
group that is below 100? Unless I'm not understanding your reply (I'm
new to NIS). On Ubuntu (and therefore Debian, I assume), audio,
plugdev, floppy, cdrom, and other important GIDs are below 100, so you
can't grant or restrict access with NIS from the server. If all you
want to do is grant or restrict access to files NIS would seem to work
just fine across a number of different clients/OSs, but when it comes
to hardware it seems to fall short - again, if I'm understanding
things correctly. And although I don't have this problem in my home
network, what happens if you want to take someone's floppy access away
and they're in another town, do you have to drive over there?

-P




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