Re: Ways to manage passwd/shadow files?

[Spam Collector]

On 2005-03-10, Brendan Strejcek <brendan@cs.uchicago.edu> wrote:
> Spam Collector wrote:
>
>> What's the best way to use cfengine to manage /etc/passwd and
>> /etc/shadow? Managing the entire file as a copy would be easy enough,
>> but how can you just manage a chunk of it? Using edifiles to control a
>> block would have the desired result, except that AFAIK you can't have
>> comment lines in those files (the ### BEGIN and ### END lines I use to
>> manage blocks in other config files).
>
> As there is no order to a passwd file, why do you need to manage it in
> blocks at all?

The purpose is to have site-wide management of some accounts while
still allowing other locally managed accounts.

Frank

>
> A trick that I am fond of is embedding vipw in shellcommands with ed as
> EDITOR, but that would not scale to large collections of users.
>
> -- Brendan
>
>