NFS - some success

[brad.mugleston at comcast.net]

Rick and Gerry,

> >
> >
> > Ah, welcome to the wonderful world of network administration.  That problem
> > has been around for a long time.  And there's a solution.  It's
> > called "NIS" (network information system), formerly known as "yp"
> > (yellow pages--which is why many of its programs are still called
> > "yp-something" such as "ypinit").
> >
> > NIS was designed so all systems can have a consistent view of the
> > passwords, home directories, etc.  If you don't need the ability to
> > mount a user's home directory over NFS when they log into a client machine
> > or any of the other "fancy" stuff NIS can do, then you could use
> > LDAP instead as a simple passwd/group/shadow replacement.  In fact, many
> > NIS implementations now use LDAP instead of the older method of using
> > flat files to hold its maps and such.
> >
> > By the way, Microsoft ADS (active directory service) is Microsoft's name
> > for LDAP.  They add a few ornaments to it, but it's LDAP.  Why the h*ll
> > can't they just use standard terminology?  Oh, yeah.  Then they couldn't
> > charge $800 for it.  Grrrr!
> >
> > > As the server is new I need all the users from the client setup
> > > on the server.
> > >
> > > While I work on that I've got 10+ Gig of mp3's and ogg files to
> > > move from various machines to my server.
> >
> >
> > You can set up an NIS server on the NFS server, then make sure all users
> > are in its maps.  By users, I mean non-system accounts such as root,
> > bin, etc.--essentially accounts with an UID/GID >= 100.  Then you set up
> > each client machine to be an NIS client and modify /etc/nsswitch.conf to
> > also use NIS.  You probably should grab a book on NIS as well.
> > O'Reilly's "Managing NFS and NIS" by Stern would be a good place to
> > start.  Remember that NIS
>
> Oops!  Incomplete editing on that.  Ignore "Remember that NIS" bit.
>
> > Alternately, you could set up LDAP on the NFS server and make the other
> > machines LDAP clients.  It's similar to setting up NIS, but the
> > components are a bit different.  There's a HOWTO on it on the Linux
> > Documentation Project site.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks, I think I'll get in to the "WORK" part of NIS and maybe
LDAP soo, when things at work slow down but for now how do I go
about getting all my users and their passwords on my server?

Do I need to enter them one at at time - having them type in
their passwords or can I copy and paste something from the
clinent machine to the server machine to get them working
together?

Thanks,

Brad