Re: Ways to manage passwd/shadow files?

[Mark Burgess]

On Thu, 2005-03-10 at 14:00 -0600, Brendan Strejcek wrote:
> Spam Collector wrote:
> 
> > What's the best way to use cfengine to manage /etc/passwd and
> > /etc/shadow? Managing the entire file as a copy would be easy enough,
> > but how can you just manage a chunk of it? Using edifiles to control a
> > block would have the desired result, except that AFAIK you can't have
> > comment lines in those files (the ### BEGIN and ### END lines I use to
> > manage blocks in other config files).
> 
> As there is no order to a passwd file, why do you need to manage it in
> blocks at all?
> 
> A trick that I am fond of is embedding vipw in shellcommands with ed as
> EDITOR, but that would not scale to large collections of users.
> 
> -- Brendan

If you can make it to USENIX, I'll be showing how I manage our netlab
which has a subset of the full set of users from another host...it
wouldn't be fair to USENIX to publish it before the tutorial.

Mark