network-spanning user/group info?

[thelee]

so yeah, at work and back at university, i know that if i log into a box, my home directory and all associated stuff automatically gets created if it's my first time to log in. because i'm a noob, i dont' know what the mechanism behind that is.

i'd really like to have something similar set up, because i have a small hometwork with an nfs box that just keeps all sorts of music and movies on it. problem is, having to manually make sure that my desktop and my laptop and any other dinky computer i put together has the same exact uid/gid info for say my login infos seems unsustainable and annoying... how would i have it so that i can get hte kind of auto behavior mentioned above - this seems like this would solve having to manually keep all the uid/gid's in sync.

[mosburn]

The easy way is openldap. There is a guide for installing and setting it up on the main gentoo site under docs.
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/ldap-howto.xml
Personally, I just keep my home directory in a svn repo and grab that. Log out and back in. Then the scripts take over from there rsyncing the latest changes that have not been moved into subversion and cleaning up some of the crap left behind. This way I don't have to worry about keeping UIDs consistant arround the network. The bonus is that I can easily move over to the BSD partition and have everything up to date.