New subject: [SLE] Distributing group membership with NIS

20 Dec 2003

      Hi all,

I've been battling with a problem accessing an external device via 
serial port. I have it working now, but am not entirely satisfied with 
the 'solution' (c.f thread "/dev/ttyS0 and /dev/ttys0 - What's the 
difference?")

The device attaches to /dev/ttyS1, which is root:uucp:rw-rw---- so I 
figured a standard user would be able to access the device without 
problem since by default they are assigned membership of group uucp. I 
found that this was not the case. After much faffing, I have identified 
the cause as NIS.

With the default setup for the min GUID as 500, the output from groups 
on the server is:

root@gandalf:~> groups dylan
dylan : dandg users dialout video uucp audio
root@gandalf:~> groups fabrizio
fabrizio : users dialout video uucp audio

(dandg is a group I have created for controlling network shared file 
access GUID=500, it is the default group for the relevant users so 
their files are created with group dandg)

on a client I get:

dylan@gandalf:~> groups
dandg
dylan@gandalf:~> groups fabrizio
users

This is clearly not satisfactory. From the point of view of accessing 
the serial port, I could set it to rw-rw-rw, but would need to do so on 
every machine which the external device might be used on. Also, that 
isn't actually the problem.

What I actually want (and indeed, expected to be the case) is that the 
full group membership be distributed by NIS. To this end, I have 
temporarily set the min GUID on the NIS maps to be 0. This has done the 
trick - normal users can now access the serial port - but still doesn't 
seem satisfactory as I notice that the groups below GUID 500 appear 
twice when system and NIS groups are listed in YaST.

Is there a better way to accomplish my goal? Should I delete the local 
entries from /etc/groups (surely not since there would be no groups 
defined either before ypbind starts or if the NIS server is 
unavailable)?

Thanks for any help, comments, hints...

Dylan

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Distributing group membership with NIS

Dylan

Damian O'Hara

Dylan

Alexandr Malusek

Dylan

Alexandr Malusek

Alexandr Malusek

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