Re: Ways to manage passwd/shadow files?

[Tim Nelson]

On Thu, 10 Mar 2005, Spam Collector wrote:

> 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.

	Do you use PAM on your machines?  If so, I'd suggest making the 
system try LDAP first, and if that fails, try local accounts (or the other 
way around).  I think even nsswitch.conf can do this (yes? no?).

        :)

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Tim Nelson
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