Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Setting Up and Administering an HP-UX NFS Diskless Cluster

NFS Diskless Questions and Answers

Chapter 10944

Users and Groups

Question: What if I want to use NIS to manage user/group data?

Answer: SAM cluster conﬁguration provides one method of sharing user/group

data, home directories and mailboxes among all of the members of a

cluster.

There are certainly other methods of accomplishing the same goals. One

example is NIS; another possible conﬁguration is to have a mail server or

home directory server that is different from the cluster server. The way

to set up one of these alternate sharing mechanisms is to select

“Private” in SAM as the policy for users and groups. Selecting

“Private” means that SAM creates the same conﬁguration on each

member of a cluster as if you did a “cold-install” of a standalone system.

You can then “manually” set up the alternative sharing mechanism (that

is, not using SAM).

Question: What if I want to change policies after I have created a cluster?

Answer: SAM does not allow you change policies after the ﬁrst client has been

added to a cluster. The only way to change policies using SAM is to delete

all clients from a cluster, pick different policies when re-adding the ﬁrst

client, and then re-add the other clients.

It is possible to modify the cluster conﬁguration manually (not using

SAM) to change a policy, but if you then use SAM to add more clients to

the cluster, SAM adds the new clients in accordance with the original

policy, ignoring your manual modiﬁcations.

Question: How do I modify the passwd ﬁle when a shared user/group policy is in

force?

Answer: You need to be careful in this case.

A program that unlinks one of these ﬁles in the process of changing it

breaks the sharing mechanisms set up by SAM. Use one of following

methods:

• Use a supported command (such as passwd (1), vipw (1M), chsh (1) or

chfn (1)).