Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second Edition

Using NIS with Shadow Support

Using NIS in conjunction with shadow password files is somewhat problematic. First we have some bad news: using NIS defeats the goals of shadow passwords. The shadow password scheme was designed to prevent nonroot users from having access to the encrypted form of the login passwords. Using NIS to share shadow data by necessity makes the encrypted passwords available to any user who can listen to the NIS server replies on the network. A policy to enforce users to choose “good” passwords is arguably better than trying to shadow passwords in an NIS environment. Let’s take a quick look at how you do it, should you decide to forge on ahead.

In libc5 there is no real solution to sharing shadow data using NIS. The only way to distribute password and user information by NIS is through the standard passwd.* maps. If you do have shadow passwords installed, the easiest way to share them is to generate a proper passwd file from /etc/shadow using tools like pwuncov, and create the NIS maps from that file.

Of course, there are some hacks necessary to use NIS and shadow passwords at the same time, for instance, by installing an /etc/shadow file on each host in the network, while distributing user information, through NIS. However, this hack is really crude and defies the goal of NIS, which is to ease system administration.

The NIS support in the GNU libc library (libc6) provides support for shadow password databases. It does not provide any real solution to making ...