[clug] Syncronising UID/GIDs when migrating to LDAP

[Alex Satrapa]

On 16/09/2007, at 10:34 , Duncan Roe wrote:

> Pardon my ignorance, but isn't that exactly what NIS is supposed to  
> do?

NIS and other centralised directories are designed to keep UIDs in  
sync across a network. The original poster's problem is that his  
machines have historically been maintained separately to each other,  
so the UID (number) to username mappings are not in sync to start  
with. So on one machine (as a hypothetical example), UID 1023 maps to  
"Fred", on another machine UID 1023 maps to "Barry", while on a third  
machine UID 1023 isn't even used yet.

So the immediate project is to get the user and group lists in sync,  
at which point they can be imported into the central directory. Once  
that's done all the machines can be configured to use the central  
directory rather than local files.

Perhaps it's me that's missing something, and NIS allows different  
UIDs for the same username across machines - which doesn't make sense  
to me since you'd need synchronised lists for NFS shares and the like.

Alex