Hi there --

I have a cluster of servers set up where one system has two NIC's and the others have one. The server with the two NIC's has an address on eth0 that is a part of the department network while the address on eth1 has a private network address specific to the cluster. The other servers in the cluster each have a private address on their respective eth0 NIC's.

I would like to set up user accounts that would be used exclusively within the cluster. One choice that came to mind was NIS where the master server would be the server with two NIC's and all other servers being clients. Another approach that I was considering was the following: Creating the user accounts on the server that has two NIC's and exporting the /etc directory to all other servers. Each server would then have a symbolic link instead of the actual passwd file pointing to the exported passwd file.

Which approach would be the better to use, or is there another alternative?

you could try and use LDAP,

http://www.yourhowto.org/content/view/35/9/ - LDAP linux client with OpenLDAP server

http://www.yourhowto.org/content/view/16/9/ - Setup OpenLDAP

http://www.yourhowto.org/content/view/21/9/ - OpenLDAP Master/Slave Replication