[Sunhelp] Recommendations for distributed password system?

[James Lockwood]

On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Bill Bradford wrote:

> Anybody have recommendations for a distributed password system
> that's NOT NIS or NIS+?  Our current setup has some perl scripts
> manually synchronizing passwords across 3 or 4 system types, and
> I need to move away from that . . . 

This begs the question of why you don't want NIS/NIS+.

If it's because you don't want central points of failure for user
authentication or the extra network load, then some type of manual
synchronization is probably the way to go.  If it's because you think
NIS/NIS+ has particular problems in your application (not related to
network-based authentication systems in general) then I would suggest LDAP
if feasable.

How frequently do you expect updates?  Are these machines relatively
static "production" systems?  NIS and NIS+ have many problems, but they're
still a decent fit much of the time (especially if you take the time to
get NIS+ running properly).

-James