Creating user accounts....

[Brian D. Ropers-Huilman]

My understanding is that NIS can be very network intensive and there are 
limits to the sizes of the maps unless you go to NIS+. Anytime a permission 
needs to be check, like when a user is accessing a file, it is an NIS call to 
see what UID the user has. This seems a little ridiculous to me, but that is 
what I recall from discussions on this list in the past (you could search the 
archives--this has been discussed at length before).

Also, my understanding is that with plain NIS the largest map you can have is 
1024 characters. If you have a lot of graduate students in a single group, you 
can quickly reach this limit. NIS+ overcomes this but I don't know if it has a 
Linux port or not.

Finally, yes, you would do well to wrap your useradd command with a script 
that added the user and then pushed out all relevant files (/etc/passwd, 
/etc/shadow, /etc/group, etc.).

On Thu, 13 Feb 2003, Srihari Angaluri wrote:
> Is there any serious performance/scalability issue to using NIS, as
> opposed to copying the individual files to each and every node on the
> cluster? Is this even a desirable option for large clusters, for
> example? What if I need to add more accounts? I have to copy the files
> all over again, right? Of course I can write scripts to automate the
> whole process, but why not maintain a central user account database
> using NIS? Can someone please elaborate on what the side effects are to
> using NIS?
> 
> Srihari

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