Alternatives for Yellow Pages?

[MFHorn]

> What
> are some alternate ways to get similar effects?  (I want user x to be able
> to use his same username and password on all our machines, and when he
> changes it on any machine, I want that change propagated to all the
> others).

We have our central server periodically (every two hours, via cron)
copy /etc/passwd, /etc/group and /etc/hosts to a list of hosts.  It's 
pretty slow, and it's very inefficient, but it works.

The shell script that does it mounts the remote host's /, copies the files
over and then runs a script located on the remote machine (if the script
exists).  This second script is used to add host specific stuff to any of
the files copied over.  Eg., one of the hosts supports several diskless
workstations, so it has a script to copy the files into the diskless
partition.  All the scripts do as thorough error checking as possible.
One thing they don't do is check if the file has changed before copying
it.

Rdist may be better, but I couldn't get it to work they way I wanted it.

The big things that you lose out on are a hashed host table (for those without a named), netgroups (/etc/exports can get pretty big) and
yppasswd (chaning your password on any machine but the central server
is meaningless).

This is probably an unacceptable solution for very large networks; we
have about 15 hosts to update, but I can send our shell scripts to whoever
wants them.

--
Andy Rosen           | arosen at hawk.ulowell.edu | "I got this guitar and I
ULowell, Box #3031   | ulowell!arosen          |  learned how to make it
Lowell, Ma 01854     |                         |  talk" -Thunder Road
		RD in '88 - The way it should've been