Exporting /home - synchronize password?

[mvip]

Hi,

Just ran into a bit of problem on my servers at home a bit ago.
After setting up another server, I realized that I'd benefit a lot of having the home-dir on one server, and exporting them from there. I had no problem exporting everything with NFS and mounting it properly. However, when I stated to add all the users on my second machine, I realized that the id-numbers in the /etc/passwd file differs, hence, the permissions of the directories gets messed up.

I realize that one way to solve this is to set up a OpenLDAP server and synchronize the passwords through there, but it seems to be a bit of work, and IMHO a bit overkill.

Anyone have any suggestions?

There got to be several ppl who use this sort of setup.


Regards,
mvip

[ectospasm]

If the user lists aren't that big, you could unify them by hand, and set up NIS. Here's a good (even if rather old) HOWTO on setting up NIS/NIS+:

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/NIS-HOWTO/index.html

This guide may also help you too, but it's Red Hat/Fedora Core specific:

http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/linux-adv/nis.htm

I set up an NIS lab at work, and it was fairly simple. If setting up NIS is no easier to set up than LDAP, I'm pissed, because I should have gone for that solution. It looked too complicated, and like you said, overkill for my needs.
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[adsmith]

just use 'usermod' and 'find' to fix the UID's (and any stray file ownership) on one of the machines.