On Mon, Jun 20, 2005 at 02:54:38PM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> This means that Debian (in particular) won't necessarily integrate
> nicely in a foreign network.
That's true for Solaris, AIX, Mac OS X etc. as well.
> There are at least 2 valid reasons that
> it may be difficult to follow this rule:
>
> * The sysadmins cannot support every OS and cannot know every
> possible conflict.
Yes they should. It's their job. NIS is about _central_ management,
which includes the list of supported configurations. If your
configuration is not on that list, then you're on your own, and cannot
expect things to 'just work'.
> * The NIS database may contain old groups (but still valid), and
> their names may have been given even before a package/software
> using these names existed. Well, this is not future-proof.
Well, then do not use NIS/NIS+/LDAP etc. The same issues exist with
other operating systems, there is nothing Debian-specific here.
Setting up NIS is not easy, especially in heterogenous environments. You
need a lot of knowledge about all "to-be-supported-in-the-future"
operating systems/distributions, and you need a central policy about how
to resolve the inevitable conflicts. But I said that a couple of times
already...
> This is a bit naive to think that everything will work OK with rules
> that are not clearly defined standards (OS-independent).
There are _NO_ standards for setting up NIS. And there will never be one
as other major UNIX vendors will not change their default setups just
for this (remember, Linux is not everything).
But even if there are no standards there are a lot of common knowledge
and rules of thumb that a good sysadmin should know about (such as low
group and user IDs are problematic so it's best to avoid them).
Gabor
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