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Was it straight forward to set up a NIS server on bubba?
Will a user added via the bubba web interface authenticate from a remote host using the NIS server on bubba? What about existing users, was it easy to migrate them to NIS?
Setting up NIS on bubba should not be any different from doing it on any other Debian Linux machine. I have however no experience on this. But there ought to be good Howtos on this if you google a bit. And a howto on how to doing it on Bubba is of course always welcome
What i usually do when i want to do stuff like this is to use LDAP instead. A very convenient way to centralize management.
Regarding authentication of users on bubba. That might be a problem. Atm we do this authentication ourselfs without using PAM which probably should be needed for this to work.
Now, NIS without NFS is not much fun. I have my $HOME on Bubba and export it with NFS to the other two machines in the house. The performance is quite OK! NFS is even simpler to configure, here's a small tutorial.
Now, as Tor suggests the setup would be even better if you used LDAP although somewhat more complicated. This would have the added benefits of, possibly, storing many other types of information besides the authentication stuff and being a bit more secure than NIS. And there are lots of tools to administer LDAP dbs. This is one of my future projects to stress my Bubba!
Exactly stuff I needed to know.
For various reasons my NFS mounts does not happen automagically, so I need to fix that first to have the same $HOME from all computers. Also I have to figure out existing UID/GID numbers from all computers to synchronize with BUBBA.
I know that ldap can be a pain in the arse to configure, depending on different schemas etc, but I have never had problems with NIS before, probably due to professional SAs. What little Unix experience I have comes mainly from Solaris at work, where I only have to bother with the client side of things. Linux server apps is a new experience since getting my bubba...
I'll get my NFS auto-mounts figured out and then try from there.
I forgot to follow up on this.
I did it, it wasn't hard, and it was well worth it.
The reason I mention it now after all this time is that I have a new computer with Windows Vista, and I suddenly realize how awkward it is to not have central authentication... I have become used to just adding friends as users in the Bubba web admin interface, and then being able to see the full name of the owner of the file(s) stored on Bubba on my Ubuntu desktop PC (via nfs).
I never bothered with LDAP in the end, because NIS was all I needed, it worked, and it worked beautifully.
