[techtalk] Multiple passwd lists ?

[Magni Onsoien]

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.

Uhm, I kind of forgot to say that we have about 20,000 users on the
system. With an updated OS (i.e. not RedHat 5.2), it's not a problem.
The performance problems we experiences were due to too many entries in
a directory (specifically /home/stud/$USER), so the home directory
structure was changed to /home/home$raid_nr/us/user which works fine.


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