[techtalk] Multiple passwd lists ?

[Magni Onsoien]

Beverly Guillermo:
> Has anyone managed a passwd and shadow list with more the 10,000 people
> on it?  Is there a way to possibly divide the passwd/shadow lists into
> smaller multiple files?  Something like passwd.master shadow.master,
> passwd.domainname1, shadow.domainname1, passwd.domainname2, and
> shadow.domainname2?

At my Uni we had passwd.$OS (because Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Irix etc
had different system users and -shells so the files were different even
though the passwords were the sa,e) in rdist and passwd.user in a special 
pwdist program someone had written. passwd.user was generated from the 
central userdatabase. There was a daemon on the dist-server receiving 
updates from the userdatabase, and then commands were run to check if 
this was an old/excisting user, create homedir etc, and to add a line to
passwd.user. Then pwdist ran every 15 minutes and copied (with scp) the
passwd.user to the clients. There it was added with passwd.$OS to
/etc/passwd and /etc/shadow. This has run for about 4 years now, so I
guess it works ok.

But I think I would have experimented a bit with LDAP if I was you. I
have been looking at it a bit and I think it may be a good solution for
you. 


Magni :)
-- 
sash is very good for you.