Re: [Setup-tool-hackers] Users - design proposal

[Hans Petter Jansson <hpj helixcode com>]

>> To avoid NIS configuration confusing users, the tab should only show up in
>> advanced mode.

> And of course if you are actually running NIS :)

No, I don't think so. If the user isn't advanced enough, he doesn't want to
affect the NIS configuration, even if the computer does have one. A host will
always be running a lot of services that the user isn't interested in, or
that are too complex to manage for a basic user.


> I need to do some work
> to return the user information from the NIS maps, and then make it
> editable (I have a horrible feeling this will have to be done on the NIS
> server - i.e it will have to run on the nis server ... in our place

Yeah. That's what the tools do - they help you manage a particular host's
services, be they client-side or server services. If you want to edit a
global NIS configuration from a client, and can't do that through the NIS
protocols, we'll have to discuss how this can be done, separately.


> that's fine (30k users) as the machine has the ability to run X
> applications (the box's other use in our machine room is 'ohmygod its
> broken I need an xterm').  Some work may need to be done in the future
> to address this, perhaps by allowing the backend to run on one machine
> and the frontend on another, but I think we should get it all working
> locally first.

Running the backend on another machine is actually not that hard. Run it
through an SSH tunnel. E.g.

ssh -l root <host> <backend> <options>

and use the stdio streams as you would regularly. The frontends can be made
to use this or a similar scheme, but we'd have to handle authentication
elegantly. Plus, there should be a way to locate the backend dir, maybe with
a hst-config script somewhere in PATH.


--
Hans Petter