Hello,

I am trying to setup a network of about 50 computers in which one machine is running on Zenwalk Snapshot as server. I create users on the server. But users will be logging in from clients.

I have used nfs to export /home from server to all the clients. This is working fine.

To migrate user information I included these lines in /etc/rc.d/rc.local of the client:

rsync 172.16.5.153:/etc/passwd /etc/passwd
rsync 172.16.5.153:/etc/shadow /etc/shadow
rsync 172.16.5.153:/etc/group /etc/group
rsync 172.16.5.153:/etc/gshadow /etc/gshadow

But this is not working since I have to give the root password of the server for rsync to work.

I know that there are other better ways like NIS or OpenLDAP. But I thought of this simple method.

How to make rsync command work?

Thanks for your help,

Anand

well as long as you know there are better ways then remember them for the future...

I would wonder how well this solution will work, you *might* have issues when installing new software on clients maybe... maybe not.

Anyway. IF you wish to explore rsync then I would suggest using it over ssh (using the -e ssh options) and then using a preshared key to authenticate, so no passwords are required. Other similar methods could use just an export of /etc and locally copying the file on each machine. i'd not really think rsync is generally a useful option as you will just want to nuke each of the 4 files each time, so you don't need anything clever for synchronization, just blind copies, so if you don't want to export the filesystems i'd more more likely to use scp rather than rsync anyway.

I have done this as explained here:

http://wiki.zenwalk.org/index.php?ti..._NFS_and_Rsync

Anand