[ On Thu, October 8, 1998 at 19:34:11 (-0400), Keith Moore wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: pseudo-shadowing of passwords with ypserv? 
>
> The problem with the number of users isn't the size of the file, it's 
> the frequency of change, and needing to keep all hosts' views of the
> passwd file reasonably in sync.

Have you heard of, and/or looked at, ACMAINT?  (David Curry, Samuel
Kimery, Kent De La Crois, Jeffrey Schwab -- there was a paper in the
October 1990 LISA I think)

I did a lot of hacking on it once upon a time, and got it pretty close
to usable.

The authors had a whole new SQL based design on the table, but I've not
heard much of it since.

The original implementation I hacked on was basically a set of TCP
services that accepted broadcast updates from a central server and
edited the local /etc/passwd & /etc/group files, created home
directories, etc.  You'd want to have ip-filter or similar on each host,
or something similar, as it's got little security, but other than that
it provided a zero-intrusion user account distribution mechanism.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>