[plug] User account management

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[Paul Baumgarten]
> I am looking for advice regarding managing systems with close on a
> thousand user accounts.

There are several projects working on this.  If you start with Jon
Finkes papers[1] and the SIMON overview you should get some ideas.
Parhaps you can even use part of the source for SIMON[3] directly.

UREG 2000[4] is a system made by the University of Oslo with similar
goals as SIMON.  Unfortunately, the documentation is in Norwegian.

GeNUAdmin[5] is a system to automate the admin tasks as much as
possible.  The description seems nice, but I have never tried it.
Exu[6] is a similar system, but seems to be unavailable at the moment.
The distribution directory told about an ongoing rewrite, and to email
the author.  Ganymede[7], the replacement for GASH, is a system to
delegete the administration of NIS and DNS.

When I was working on this at the University of Tromsø, we ended up
making our own system based on the ideas from SIMON and UREG using
PostgreSQL, PHP and Perl.  This was two years ago.  I assume there are
almost finished systems which could be used instead of building ones
own.

While searching, I came across the Unix Admin Horror stories[0].  Read
it and laugh. :-)
Karl Ramm and Michael Grubb
References:
  0 Unix Admin Horror
    <URL:http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/8009/unix.admin.horror..html>
  1 Jon Fikes Papers
    <URL:http://www.rpi.edu/~finkej/Papers.html>
  2 Simon overview
    <URL:http://www.rpi.edu/campus/rpi/simon/misc/Simon.html>
  3 Simon Oracle schemas and source
    <URL:http://www.rpi.edu/campus/rpi/simon/misc/SIM2/SIMON-index.html>
    <URL:http://www.rpi.edu/campus/rpi/simon/>
  4 UREG 2000
    <URL:http://www.usit.uio.no/it/drift/ureg2000/>
  5 GeNUAdmin
    <URL:http://www.genua.de/forum/artikel/lisa94/>
  6 Exu - A System for Secure Delegation of Authority on an Insecure Network
    <URL:http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/lisa95/full_papers/ramm.txt>
  7 Ganymede: An Extensible and Customizable Directory Management Framework
    <URL:http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa98/full_papers/abbey/abbey_html/abbey.html>
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