Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm
List-Subscribe: <mailto:cygwin-subscribe AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Archive: <http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/>
List-Post: <mailto:cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Help: <mailto:cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com>, <http://sources.redhat.com/ml/#faqs>
Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com
Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
X-Injected-Via-Gmane: http://gmane.org/
Path: not-for-mail
From: Andrew DeFaria <ADeFaria AT Salira DOT com>
Subject: Re: Is it possible to use centralized passwords with cygwin inetd?
Date: Fri, 06 Dec 2002 13:18:21 -0800
Lines: 39
Message-ID: <3DF1141D.9070606@Salira.com>
References: <4 DOT 3 DOT 2 DOT 7 DOT 2 DOT 20021205165656 DOT 017fac68 AT goblet DOT cisco DOT com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: 206.184.204.2
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1039209597 18956 206.184.204.2 (6 Dec 2002 21:19:57 GMT)
X-Complaints-To: usenet AT main DOT gmane DOT org
NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 21:19:57 +0000 (UTC)
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020823 Netscape/7.0
X-Accept-Language: en-us, en, ru, zh

(Send to the list and the sender)...

Bruce P. Osler wrote:

> For starters - I'd like to contribute to the Cygwin love-fest going
> on.  I think Cygwin is an awesome environment with huge benefits
> for folks working under windows.
>
> Today I'm interested in finding out wether I can use networked
> password services with the cygwin inetd.  At work I would like to
> setup a series of computers with Cygwin tools all of which are
> running the Cygwin inetd.  As there are a couple of hundred engineers
> in this environment the option of maintaining multiple /etc/passwd
> files is a bit onerous (if not unreasonable).  All of these computers
> are already hooked into an environment where the user passwords are
> provided and managed centrally to an NT domain.  Is there any way
> I can have Cygwin/inetd use the central domain password service
> for authentication?

Short answer: Yes.

Slightly longer answer: Create a passwd file with mkpasswd -d and store 
it on a common area. Then symlink /etc/passwd -> 
//<commonserver>/<commonshare>/passwd. Normally people worry about 
symlinking such files as /etc/passwd because it would be hard to boot up 
and log into the machine if the network were down. But you don't boot up 
nor log into Cygwin as per se, rather you log into Windows first.

You might wish to do this for /etc/group too.

You might wish to scriptize mkpasswd to call /bin/mkpasswd then perform 
some fix ups on the resulting passwd file before making it global.

You might wish to develop a script to insure the above symlink(s) are 
properly in place as well as say mounting //<commonserver>/<homeshare> 
-> /home, etc.

This is what I do and it works very well.




--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Bug reporting:         http://cygwin.com/bugs.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/