Markus Natter wrote: <snip>
Hello Art,
NFS is working on a trust basis. The NFS-Server trusts the allowed machines that they have the same auth base like itself. A user is defined by its numerical user-ID and this UID-number has an "alias", its username, like "lilo".
If you add a user on the first machine, it gets the first free UID-Number (it may start from different values! Normally, it is said that you shouldn't use UID-nums below 100 for normal user accounts and the SuSE distros had started from UID-num 500 (as the number for required system accounts are growing), but then (I think it was from 9.2 on), they started from 1000, you can check this in /etc/login.defs -> see UID_MIN..).
You see, if you'd add two namely identical users in a different order, or on two different SuSE releases, their userid numbers would most likely differ ..
Have a look into your /etc/passwd and check the userid-number of your "identical" users, I bet they are not the same..
That's why most people are going to use central auth mechanisms, like NIS, LDAP, ... which also means, that you have to take care about those services, which have caveats as well.. (got LDAP running, well, do have it encrypted? use LDAPS, then you need SSL / x509 certs.. a.s.o.)
You could simply try to copy your /etc/passwd, /etc/group, /etc/shadow file entries over.. (be careful, better copy only the lines with the required users, not the whole files)
Give it a try,
then you might try LDAP
Markus
OK, that info brings another question or two. I do have one laptop with WinXP on it for work. Would I better off just using Samba instead of NFS or should I run them in parallel and can they both use the same ldaps server? All of the other machines are Suse 9.3. Art