Linux – Syncing user accounts across multiple servers

linuxsynchronization

I have been wondering if there is a better way to manage user accounts across multiple servers.

At the moment, I have a main user account (e.g. 'user') on my home/dev machine, and for each server I manually create that same 'user' account. Then I use rsync to copy my .ssh directory and any other directories I want to each new server.

While this seems OK for managing the 2 servers I currently manage, I cannot imagine doing the same thing for 10+ servers, and was wondering what the best way to go about this was.

Thanks!

Best Answer

There are two popular approaches

You either setup central authentication (ldap, nis).
You setup a configuration management system (puppet,chef,cfengine, shell script) to automatically create accounts, and configure the environment on all your managed systems.

Central authentication systems are good when all the systems are all under the control of the same organization. It tends to be necessary when you have lots of users, and when will need to use the authentication for many things behind just logging in.

The configuration management way is good if you generally just need to setup a small number of remote admin accounts, and service accounts.

Related Solutions

Linux – Multiple *NIX Accounts with Identical UID

My opinion:

Is this ability designed or is it just the way it happens to work?

It is designed. Since I started using *NIX, you have been able to place users on common groups. The ability to have the UID be the same without problems is just an intended result that, like everything, might bring problems if incorrectly managed.

Is this going to be consistent across *nix variants?

I believe so.

Is this accepted practice?

Accepted as in generally used in one way or another, yes.

Are there unintended consequences to this practice?

Other than login auditing, you have nothing else. Unless you wanted exactly that, to start with.

Linux – create home directories after create users

This might sound like a silly idea, but if the users aren't actually doing anything, you could do:

cat /etc/passwd | cut -f 1 -d : >/tmp/users.list

Then edit /tmp/users.list to only contain the users you want. Then do:


for i in `cat /tmp/users.list`
do
    userdel $i
    useradd -m $i
done

However, many Redhat based distributions will create you a new home directory when you first login, providing it is specified in /etc/passwd where the directory should be.

To test that, do an "su - " and see if it does "the right thing". If it doesn't, the above script will work quite nicely, I think.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – Multiple *NIX Accounts with Identical UID

Linux – create home directories after create users

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