Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second Edition

Using the passwd and group Maps

One of the major applications of NIS is synchronizing user and account information on all hosts in an NIS domain. Consequently, you usually keep only a small local /etc/passwd file, to which site-wide information from the NIS maps is appended. However, simply enabling NIS lookups for this service in nsswitch.conf is not nearly enough.

When relying on the password information distributed by NIS, you first have to make sure that the numeric user IDs of any users you have in your local passwd file match the NIS server’s idea of user IDs. Consistency in user IDs is important for other purposes as well, like mounting NFS volumes from other hosts in your network.

If any of the numeric IDs in /etc/passwd or /etc/group differ from those in the maps, you have to adjust file ownerships for all files that belong to that user. First, you should change all uids and gids in passwd and group to the new values, then find that all files that belong to the users just changed and change their ownership. Assume news used to have a user ID of 9 and okir had a user ID of 103, which were changed to some other value; you could then issue the following commands as root:

# find / -uid   9 -print >/tmp/uid.9
# find / -uid 103 -print >/tmp/uid.103
# cat /tmp/uid.9   | xargs chown news
# cat /tmp/uid.103 | xargs chown okir

It is important that you execute these commands with the new passwd file installed, and that you collect all filenames before you change the ownership of ...