🚀 go-pugleaf

Excerpts from netnews.comp.sys.next: 10-Nov-92 Updating password files
rem.. by Robert J. Granvin@umnsta 

> Can someone give me pointers (email, please!) on the best way to update
> user account information without having to go through the user interface
> that it so plainly seems to want to force on you?  I've gone through the
> FAQ's I can find, which has been enlightening on some things, but not this.
> (Because of the network design and planned usage of the slab, all user
> accounts will be on mounted drives - other than root and one or two other
> accounts, nothing will physically reside on the NeXTstation itself...)
>  
> All recommendations for this novice-NeXT-site appreciated... Email is even
> more appreciated...

Get a copy of the /etc/passwd file from the other machines onto the NeXT
(or have it available from one of the NFS directories).  The appropriate
command to load the passwd file into the NetInfo database is "niload -d
passwd . < _DEC_passwd_file_".  Note that you must be root to do this.

If you want to automate this process, have this command run from crontab.

But you'd be much better off using yp/NIS; updating things like
/etc/passwd when necessary is what yp/NIS was designed to do.

-Chuck


+---------------------------------------------+ 
|  Charles William Swiger -- CMU sucks rocks  | "The television screen is the
|   AMS & normal mail: cs4w+@andrew.cmu.edu   | retina of the mind's eye."
|    NeXTmail: <temporarily out of order>     |           
+---------------------------------------------+            --Videodrome