CentOS - Apr 2020 - CentOS 8 NIS

Nicolas Kovacs writes:
> Le 09/04/2020 ? 11:05, isdtor a ?crit :
> > NIS works fine on CentOS 8. Certainly the client side. But how
it's enabled
> > is different, check the manual. authconfig is replaced with
authselect.
> 
> NIS "works fine" in the sense that telnet works fine.
> 
> :o)
It is not our job here to second-guess implementation decisions made by others
as only the people concerned are familiar with their environment's
restraints and business requirements.

On 2020-04-09 05:14, isdtor wrote:
> Nicolas Kovacs writes:
>> Le 09/04/2020 ? 11:05, isdtor a ?crit :
>>> NIS works fine on CentOS 8. Certainly the client side. But how
it's enabled
>>> is different, check the manual. authconfig is replaced with
authselect.
>>
>> NIS "works fine" in the sense that telnet works fine.
>>
>> :o)
> 
> It is not our job here to second-guess implementation decisions made by
others as only the people concerned are familiar with their environment's
restraints and business requirements.
> 
Yes, let me validate Mr. Kovacs comment.  I am aware of the shortcomings 
of NIS in the area of security.  Let me provide some information on the 
topography of my network and my reasoning for choosing NIS/NFS.  Perhaps 
an alternative may be suggested to meet my needs without totally 
confounding me when it comes to configuration.  I tried another solution 
some time ago but failed miserably.  Search for "nobody:nobody" in my 
transactions on this mail list from 2019/04/02.

I have a small home network, four CentOS boxes, three running CentOS 6 
at the moment.  This network is behind an ONT and an Edgerouter. 
Machine #4 is a newly constructed AMD 16 core with a set of four 2TB HDs 
that will be configured as a RAID array.  I plan to host the home 
directories of all the users on my network on the array and share them 
out to the other three machines to be auto-mounted when the user logs 
in.  I did this successfully using NIS/NFS about 20 years ago in a small 
private grade school network that I built from the scrap heap of old and 
abandoned machines, and no money, that they had on hand.

All the machines on my home network will eventually be running CentOS 8 
seeing that CentOS 6 is very near EOL.  Being that they will all be 
running the same flavor of CentOS should make configuration a bit easier.

I need a set of tools that is fairly simple to configure, by which I 
mean has complete and accurate documentation which I can find, and does 
not present impediments to future system configuration.  My hope is to 
do all the user management on the 16 core that will be hosting the raid. 
  I don't want to have to log onto all the other machines to twiddle 
bits each time I want to add a new user account.

I designed the 16 core with the intent of putting it's 
non-entertainment/educational clock cycles to work as a Monero miner.  I 
chose Monero because it is specifically resistant to ASIC implementation 
demanding excellent system CPU and GPU performance and plenty of RAM, 64 
Gb in this case.  There's no point in trying to mine Bit Coin et al. 
unless you plan to live for the 1000 years it will take to earn just one.

Now that I've bored you to tears, are there any suggestions as to what I 
should use as a replacement for NIS/NFS for sharing and mounting of 
/home directories on the other three machines on my network?  Consider 
that you are probably going to end up holding my hand in this endeavor 
so choose something that you would want to configure and use.

Choose wisely Grasshopper.

-- 
     _
    ?v?
   /(_)\
    ^ ^  Mark LaPierre
Registered Linux user No #267004
https://linuxcounter.net/
****

> Yes, let me validate Mr. Kovacs comment.  I am aware of the shortcomings 
> of NIS in the area of security.  Let me provide some information on the 
> topography of my network and my reasoning for choosing NIS/NFS.  Perhaps 
> an alternative may be suggested to meet my needs without totally 
> confounding me when it comes to configuration. 
The good thing about YP/NIS is that it's simple - if all you want is
for your clients to get user info it is ideal. Unfortunately it was
designed in a time when passwords were hard to crack and "script
kiddie" was a yet to be invented term. Some of my systems still use
NIS+. but they are isolated and legacy.

> 
> Now that I've bored you to tears, are there any suggestions as to what
I
> should use as a replacement for NIS/NFS for sharing and mounting of 
> /home directories on the other three machines on my network?  Consider 
> that you are probably going to end up holding my hand in this endeavor 
> so choose something that you would want to configure and use.
> 
I think your best bet is to see what's supported in sssd - that will at
least give you some hope of getting some level of consistency. Pick
something that takes your fancy and isn't too complex. TBH you are
probably going to settle on some implementation of LDAP - probably
OpenLDAP - yes, I know you've tried it before, but it should work.
Configuring the clients to use LDAP via SSSD is not a problem; your
issue is going to be setting up the LDAP server. It's a long time since
I've done it so I'm not a person to hand hold, but your needs are
simple and there will be plenty of tutorials and guides and how-to's
out there to step you through the process. Once the LDAP server is
setup you basically never have to touch it - all configuration is done
through processes interacting with the server, including provisioning
accounts and so on - even the initial configuration is done by talking
to the server.

There are other options than LDAP, and servers other than OpenLDAP, but
LDAP is the de facto standard.

P.