Network passwords (was Re: How can I set passwords from script/file?)

[Rich Braun]

The Novell network has support for synchronizing passwords across all
servers whenever a user sets the password on any one of them.

I have an environment which consists of several dissimilar Unix systems
on a TCP/IP network; AIX is the main "server".  Is there a reasonable
way to propagate passwords to other systems whenever a user sets the
user account password on one of them?  Presumably, SCO and IBM use
different hashing schemes for passwords, and they both go to some trouble
to make the password-setting operation difficult.

As things stand, it's hard for me to imagine having a secure network,
because users will tend to leave their passwords as simple as possible
for long periods on various systems, leaving the system open for password-
hacking.  Forcing them to change their password on a monthly basis would
be nice, but impractical if they have to log into every system (some
of which are used infrequently) to do so.

-rich