[plug] Password syncing, comments/suggestions?

[Michael Hunt]

Ben Jensz [mailto:jensz at wn.com.au] wrote an awful lot which I have snipped
to a great extent:

<snipped copious amount of text>

> Basically I'm looking at it from two points, one being able to maintain
> one set of users with identical passwords across both boxen, and
> secondly, the users themselves being able to change their passwords (for
> both machines) without me having to attend to them individually.

What you are after here is a centralized database for authentication. I am
assuming that because you are running samba as a PDC that you do not have
any NT servers in the mix here.

Basically LDAP is your friend and is the thing that you are after to
centralize all you accounts. Using the samba passwd utility you can have
users change their nix passwords in LDAP at the same time that they are
changing there samba passwords. You may have to write a script to
consolidate UID's across the two boxes for the various accounts as I expect
that they will probably be out of synch.

Check out the LDAP how to at http://www.linuxdoc.org/ or OpenLDAP
http://www.openldap.org/

Michael Hunt

P.S. I have the notes from the LDAP talk at the recent LCA 2002. But the
websites mentioned above have pretty comprehensive doco. LDAP is also part
of RedHat 7.2 so you shouldn't have too many dramas.