Please Help a wannabe admin

[hinken]

Hi there fellow gentoo-users!

I want to manage users and groups on a single computer(server comp.) and mirror that onto the other computers on the network.

For example:
I want to add 30 new students/users. I create 30 accounts on my server and I want the students to be able to login on any computer in the network.

How do manage that?
I guess I'm looking for a remote uid/guid generator......or do I map the /etc/group and /etc/passw from the server using NFS?

Please help!

[grimm26]

What you want is Network Information Service, aka NIS aka yp. yes, people will bitch that it is not secure. You could also set up an LDAP based name service and use TLS to encrypt communications. Or, you can go simple and just set up a cronjob to scp your /etc name files to all your clients.

If you wanna try NIS, you'll need to emerge yp-tools, ypserv, and ypbind. Your clients won't need the ypserv package. Check out info at http://www.linux-nis.org/nis/ and the included docs.
Basically, what happens is that dbm files are made of your name service files and shared across client machines from the master.

have fun!
_________________
"Blessed is he who finds happiness in his own foolishness, for he will always be happy".

[hinken]

Thank you!

I will try NIS.