Written by Bill Swingle <unfurl@FreeBSD.org>, 21 January 2000, enhanced with parts and comments from Eric Ogren <eogren@earthlink.net> and Udo Erdelhoff <ue@nathan.ruhr.de> in June 2000.
NIS, which stands for Network Information Services, was developed by Sun Microsystems to centralize adminstration of Unix (originally SunOS) systems. It has now essentially become an industry standard; all major Unices (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, etc) support NIS.
NIS was formerly known as Yellow Pages (or yp), but due to copyright violations, Sun was forced to change the name.
It is a RPC-based client/server system that allows a group of machines within an NIS domain to share a common set of configuration files. This permits a system administrator to set up NIS client systems with only minimal configuration data and add, remove or modify configuration data from a single location.
It is similar to Windows NT's domain system; although the internal implementation of the two aren't at all similar, the basic functionality can be compared.
There are several terms and several important user processes that you will come across when attempting to implement NIS on FreeBSD, whether you are trying to create an NIS server or act an NIS client:
The NIS domainname. An NIS master server and all of its clients (including its slave servers) have a NIS domainname. Similar to an NT domain name, the NIS domainname does not have anything to do with DNS.
portmap. portmap must be running in order to enable RPC (Remote Procedure Call, a network protocol used by NIS). If portmap is not running, it will be impossible to run an NIS server, or to act as an NIS client.
ypbind. ypbind ``binds'' an NIS client to its NIS server. It will take the NIS domainname from the system, and using RPC, connect to the server. ypbind is the core of client-server communication in an NIS environment; if ypbind dies on a client machine, it will not be able to access the NIS server.
ypserv. ypserv, which should only be running on NIS servers, is the NIS server process itself. If ypserv dies, then the server will no longer be able to respond to NIS requests (hopefully, there is a slave server to take over for it).
Note: There are some implementations of NIS (but not the FreeBSD one), that don't try to reconnect to another server if the server it used before dies. Often, the only thing that helps in this case is to restart the server process (or even the whole server) or the ypbind process on the client.
rpc.yppasswdd. rpc.yppasswdd, another process that should only be running on NIS master servers, is a daemon that will allow NIS clients to change their NIS passwords. If this daemon is not running, users will have to login to the NIS master server and change their passwords there.
There are three types of hosts in an NIS environment; master servers, slave servers, and clients. Servers act as a central repository for host configuration information. Master servers hold the authoritative copy of this information, while slave servers mirror this information for redundancy. Clients rely on the servers to provide this information to them.
Information in many files can be shared in this manner. The master.passwd, group, and hosts files are commonly shared via NIS. Whenever a process on a client needs information that would normally be found in these files locally, it makes a query to the server it is bound to, to get this information.
A NIS master server. This server, analogous to a Windows NT primary domain controller, maintains the files used by all of the NIS clients. The passwd, group, and other various files used by the NIS clients live on the master server.
Note: It is possible for one machine to be an NIS master server for more than one NIS domain. However, this will not be covered in this introduction, which assumes a relatively small-scale NIS environment.
NIS slave servers. Similar to NT's backup domain controllers, NIS slave servers maintain copies of the NIS master's data files. NIS slave servers provide the redundancy, which is needed in important enviroments. They also help to balance the load of the master server: NIS Clients always attach to the NIS server, whose response they get first, and this includes slave-server-replies.
NIS clients. NIS clients, like most NT workstations, authenticate against the NIS server (or the NT domain controller in the NT Workstation case) to logon.
This section will deal with setting up a sample NIS environment.
Note: This section assumes that you are running FreeBSD 3.3 or later. The instructions given here will probably work for any version of FreeBSD greater than 3.0, but there are no guarantees that this is true.
Let's assume that you are the administrator of a small university lab. This lab, which consists of 15 FreeBSD machines, currently has no centralised point of administration; each machine has its own /etc/passwd and /etc/master.passwd. These files are kept in sync with each other only through manual intervention; currently, when you add a user to the lab, you must run adduser on all 15 machines. Clearly, this has to change, so you have decided to convert the lab to use NIS, using two of the machines as servers.
Therefore, the configuration of the lab now looks something like:
| Machine name | IP address | Machine role |
|---|---|---|
| ellington | 10.0.0.2 | NIS master |
| coltrane | 10.0.0.3 | NIS slave |
| basie | 10.0.0.4 | Faculty workstation |
| bird | 10.0.0.5 | Client machine |
| cli[1-11] | 10.0.0.[6-17] | Other client machines |
If you are setting up a NIS scheme for the first time, it is a good idea to think through how you want to go about it. No matter what the size of your network, there are a few decisions that need to be made.
This might not be the ``domainname'' that you are used to. It is more accurately called the ``NIS domainname''. When a client broadcasts its requests for info, it includes the name of the NIS domain that it is part of. This is how multiple servers on one network can tell which server should answer which request. Think of the NIS domainname as the name for a group of hosts that are related in someway way.
Some organizations choose to use their Internet domainname for their NIS domainname. This is not recommended as it can cause confusion when trying to debug network problems. The NIS domainname should be unique within your network and it is helpful if it describes the group of machines it represents. For example, the Art department at Acme Inc. might be in the "acme-art" NIS domain. For this example, assume you have chosen the name test-domain.
However, some operating systems (notably SunOS) use their NIS domain name as their Internet domain name. If one or more machines on your network have this restriction, you must use the Internet domain name as your NIS domain name.
There are several things to keep in mind when choosing a machine to use as a NIS server. One of the unfortunate things about NIS is the level of dependency the clients have on the server. If a client cannot contact the server for its NIS domain, very often the machine becomes unusable. The lack of user and group information causes most systems to temporarily freeze up. With this in mind you should make sure to choose a machine that won't be prone to being rebooted regularly, or one that might be used for development. The NIS server should ideally be a stand alone machine whose sole purpose in life is to be an NIS server. If you have a network that is not very heavily used, it is acceptable to put the NIS server on a machine running other services, just keep in mind that if the NIS server becomes unavailable, it will affect all of your NIS clients adversely.
The canonical copies of all NIS information are stored on a single machine called the NIS master server. The databases used to store the information are called NIS maps. In FreeBSD, these maps are stored in /var/yp/[domainname] where [domainname] is the name of the NIS domain being served. A single NIS server can support several domains at once, therefore it is possible to have several such directories, one for each supported domain. Each domain will have its own independent set of maps.
NIS master and slave servers handle all NIS requests with the ypserv daemon. Ypserv is responsible for receiving incoming requests from NIS clients, translating the requested domain and map name to a path to the corresponding database file and transmitting data from the database back to the client.
Setting up a master NIS server can be relatively straight forward, depending on your needs. FreeBSD comes with support for NIS out-of-the-box. All you need is to add the following lines to /etc/rc.conf, and FreeBSD will do the rest for you.
nisdomainname="test-domain"
This line will set the NIS domainname to test-domain upon network setup (e.g.
after reboot).
nis_server_enable="YES"
This will tell FreeBSD to start up the NIS server
processes when the networking is next brought
up.
nis_yppasswdd_enable="YES"
This will enable the rpc.yppasswdd daemon, which, as
mentioned above, will allow users to change their
NIS password from a client machine.Now, everything you have to do is to run the command /etc/netstart as superuser. It will setup everything for you, using the values you defined in /etc/rc.conf.
The NIS maps are database files, that are kept in the /var/yp directory. They are generated from configuration files in the /etc directory of the NIS master, with one exception: the /etc/master.passwd file. This is for a good reason; you don't want to propogate passwords to your root and other administrative accounts to all the servers in the NIS domain. Therefore, before we initialize the NIS maps, you should:
# cp /etc/master.passwd /var/yp/master.passwd
# cd /var/yp
# vi master.passwd
You should remove all entries regarding system accounts (bin, tty, kmem, games, etc), as well as any accounts that you don't want to be propogated to the NIS clients (for example root and any other UID 0 (superuser) accounts).
Note: Make sure the /var/yp/master.passwd is neither group nor world readable (mode 600)! Use the chmod command, if appreciate.
When you have finished, it's time to initialize the NIS maps! FreeBSD includes a script named ypinit to do this for you (see its man page for more information). Note that this script is available on most UNIX OSs, but not on all. On Digital Unix/Compaq Tru64 Unix it is called ypsetup. Because we are generating maps for an NIS master, we are going to pass the -m option to ypinit. To generate the NIS maps, assuming you already performed the steps above, run:
ellington# ypinit -m test-domain
Server Type: MASTER Domain: test-domain
Creating an YP server will require that you answer a few questions.
Questions will all be asked at the beginning of the procedure.
Do you want this procedure to quit on non-fatal errors? [y/n: n] n
Ok, please remember to go back and redo manually whatever fails.
If you don't, something might not work.
At this point, we have to construct a list of this domains YP servers.
rod.darktech.org is already known as master server.
Please continue to add any slave servers, one per line. When you are
done with the list, type a <control D>.
master server : ellington
next host to add: coltrane
next host to add: ^D
The current list of NIS servers looks like this:
ellington
coltrane
Is this correct? [y/n: y] y
[..output from map generation..]
NIS Map update completed.
ellington has been setup as an YP master server without any errors.
ypinit should have created /var/yp/Makefile from /var/yp/Makefile.dist. When created, this file assumes that you are operating in a single server NIS environment with only FreeBSD machines. Since test-domain has a slave server as well, you must edit /var/yp/Makefile:
ellington# vi /var/yp/Makefile
You should comment out the line that says `NOPUSH = "True"' (if it is not commented out already).
Setting up an NIS slave server is even more simple than setting up the master. Logon to the slave server and edit the file /etc/rc.conf as you did before. The only difference is that we now must use the -s option when running ypinit. The -s option requires the name of the NIS master be passed to it as well, so our command line looks like:
coltrane# ypinit -s ellington test-domain
Server Type: SLAVE Domain: test-domain Master: ellington
Creating an YP server will require that you answer a few questions.
Questions will all be asked at the beginning of the procedure.
Do you want this procedure to quit on non-fatal errors? [y/n: n] n
Ok, please remember to go back and redo manually whatever fails.
If you don't, something might not work.
There will be no further questions. The remainder of the procedure
should take a few minutes, to copy the databases from ellington.
Transferring netgroup...
ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred
Transferring netgroup.byuser...
ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred
Transferring netgroup.byhost...
ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred
Transferring master.passwd.byuid...
ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred
Transferring passwd.byuid...
ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred
Transferring passwd.byname...
ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred
Transferring group.bygid...
ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred
Transferring group.byname...
ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred
Transferring services.byname...
ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred
Transferring rpc.bynumber...
ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred
Transferring rpc.byname...
ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred
Transferring protocols.byname...
ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred
Transferring master.passwd.byname...
ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred
Transferring networks.byname...
ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred
Transferring networks.byaddr...
ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred
Transferring netid.byname...
ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred
Transferring hosts.byaddr...
ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred
Transferring protocols.bynumber...
ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred
Transferring ypservers...
ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred
Transferring hosts.byname...
ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred
coltrane has been setup as an YP slave server without any errors.
Don't forget to update map ypservers on ellington.
You should now have a directory called /var/yp/test-domain. Copies of the NIS master server's maps should be in this directory. You will need to make sure that these stay updated. The following /etc/crontab entries on your slave servers should do the job:
20 * * * * root /usr/libexec/ypxfr passwd.byname
21 * * * * root /usr/libexec/ypxfr passwd.byuid
These two lines force the slave to sync its maps with the maps on the master server. Although this is not mandatory, because the master server tries to make sure any changes to it's NIS maps are communicated to it's slaves, the password information is so vital to systems that depend on the server, that it is a good idea to force the updates. This is more important on busy networks where map updates might not always complete.
Now, run the command /etc/netstart on the slave server as well, which again starts the NIS server.
An NIS client establishes what is called a binding to a particular NIS server using the ypbind daemon. ypbind checks the system's default domain (as set by the domainname command), and begins broadcasting RPC requests on the local network. These requests specify the name of the domain for which ypbind is attempting to establish a binding. If a server that has been configured to serve the requested domain receives one of the broadcasts, it will respond to ypbind, which will record the server's address. If there are several servers available (a master and several slaves, for example), ypbind will use the address of the first one to respond. From that point on, the client system will direct all of its NIS requests to that server. Ypbind will occasionally ``ping'' the server to make sure it is still up and running. If it fails to receive a reply to one of its pings within a reasonable amount of time, ypbind will mark the domain as unbound and begin broadcasting again in the hopes of locating another server.
Setting up a FreeBSD machine to be a NIS client is fairly straight forward.
Edit the file /etc/rc.conf and add the following lines in order to set the NIS domainname and start ypbind upon network startup:
nisdomainname="test-domain"
nis_client_enable="YES"
To import all possible password entries from the NIS server, add this line to your /etc/master.passwd file, using vipw:
+:::::::::
Note: This line will afford anyone with a valid account in the NIS server's password maps an account. There are many ways to configure your NIS client by changing this line. See the netgroups part below for more information. For more detailed reading see O'Reilly's book on Managing NFS and NIS.
To import all possible group entries from the NIS server, add this line to your /etc/group file:
+:*::
After completing these steps, you should be able to run ypcat passwd and see the NIS server's passwd map.
In general, any remote user can issue an RPC to ypserv and retrieve the contents of your NIS maps, provided the remote user knows your domainname. To prevent such unauthorized transactions, ypserv supports a feature called securenets which can be used to restrict access to a given set of hosts. At startup, ypserv will attempt to load the securenets information from a file called /var/yp/securenets.
Note: This path varies depending on the path specified with the -p option. This file contains entries that consist of a network specification and a network mask separated by white space. Lines starting with ``#'' are considered to be comments. A sample securenets file might look like this:
# allow connections from local host -- mandatory
127.0.0.1 255.255.255.255
# allow connections from any host
# on the 192.168.128.0 network
192.168.128.0 255.255.255.0
# allow connections from any host
# between 10.0.0.0 to 10.0.15.255
# this includes the machines in the testlab
10.0.0.0 255.255.240.0
If ypserv receives a request from an address that matches one of these rules, it will process the request normally. If the address fails to match a rule, the request will be ignored and a warning message will be logged. If the /var/yp/securenets file does not exist, ypserv will allow connections from any host.
The ypserv program also has support for Wietse Venema's tcpwrapper package. This allows the administrator to use the tcpwrapper configuration files for access control instead of /var/yp/securenets.
Note: While both of these access control mechanisms provide some security, they, like the privileged port test, are vulnerable to ``IP spoofing'' attacks. All NIS-related traffic should be blocked at your firewall.
Servers using /var/yp/securenets may fail to serve legitimate NIS clients with archaic TCP/IP implementations. Some of these implementations set all host bits to zero when doing broadcasts and/or fail to observe the subnet mask when calculating the broadcast address. While some of these problems can be fixed by changing the client configuration, other problems may force the retirement of the client systems in question or the abandonment of /var/yp/securenets.
Using /var/yp/securenets on a server with such an archaic implementation of TCP/IP is a really bad idea and will lead to loss of NIS functionality for large parts of your network.
The use of the tcpwrapper package increases the latency of your NIS server. The additional delay may be long enough to cause timeouts in client programs, especially in busy networks or with slow NIS servers. If one or more of your client systems suffers from these symptoms, you should convert the client systems in question into NIS slave servers and force them to bind to themselves.
In our lab, there is a machine basie that is supposed to be a faculty only workstation. We don't want to take this machine out of the NIS domain, yet the passwd file on the master NIS server contains accounts for both faculty and students. What can we do?
There is a way to bar specific users from logging on to a machine, even if they are present in the NIS database. To do this, all you must do is add -username to the end of the /etc/master.passwd file on the client machine, where username is the username of the user you wish to bar from logging in. This should preferably be done using vipw, since vipw will sanity check your changes to /etc/master.passwd, as well as automatically rebuild the password database when you finish editing. For example, if we wanted to bar user bill from logging on to basie we would:
basie# vipw
[add -bill to the end, exit]
vipw: rebuilding the database...
vipw: done
basie# cat /etc/master.passwd
root:[password]:0:0::0:0:The super-user:/root:/bin/csh
toor:[password]:0:0::0:0:The other super-user:/root:/bin/sh
daemon:*:1:1::0:0:Owner of many system processes:/root:/sbin/nologin
operator:*:2:5::0:0:System &:/:/sbin/nologin
bin:*:3:7::0:0:Binaries Commands and Source,,,:/:/sbin/nologin
tty:*:4:65533::0:0:Tty Sandbox:/:/sbin/nologin
kmem:*:5:65533::0:0:KMem Sandbox:/:/sbin/nologin
games:*:7:13::0:0:Games pseudo-user:/usr/games:/sbin/nologin
news:*:8:8::0:0:News Subsystem:/:/sbin/nologin
man:*:9:9::0:0:Mister Man Pages:/usr/share/man:/sbin/nologin
bind:*:53:53::0:0:Bind Sandbox:/:/sbin/nologin
uucp:*:66:66::0:0:UUCP pseudo-user:/var/spool/uucppublic:/usr/libexec/uucp/uucico
xten:*:67:67::0:0:X-10 daemon:/usr/local/xten:/sbin/nologin
pop:*:68:6::0:0:Post Office Owner:/nonexistent:/sbin/nologin
nobody:*:65534:65534::0:0:Unprivileged user:/nonexistent:/sbin/nologin
+:::::::::
-bill
basie#
The netgroups part was contributed by Udo Erdelhoff <ue@nathan.ruhr.de> in July 2000.
The method shown in the previous chapter works reasonably well if you need special rules for a very small number of users and/or machines. On larger networks, you will forget to bar some users from logging onto sensitive machines, or you may even have to modify each machine separately, thus loosing the main benefit of NIS, centralised administration.
The NIS developers' solution for this problem is called netgroups. Their purpose and semantics can be compared to the normal groups used by Unix file systems. The main differences are the lack of a numeric id and the ability to define a netgroup by including both user accounts and other netgroups.
Netgroups were developed to handle large, complex networks with hundreds of users and machines. On one hand, this is a Good Thing if you are forced to deal with such a situation. On the other hand, this complexity makes it almost impossible to explain netgroups with really simple examples. The example used in the remainder of this chapter demonstrates this problem.
Let us assume that your successful introduction of NIS in your laboratory caught your superiors' interest. Your next job is to extend your NIS domain to cover some of the other machines on campus. The two tables contain the names of the new users and new machines as well as brief descriptions of them.
| User Name(s) | Description |
|---|---|
| alpha, beta | Normal employees of the IT department |
| charlie, delta | The new apprentices of the IT department |
| echo, foxtrott, golf, ... | Ordinary employees |
| able, baker, ... | The current interns |
| Machine Name(s) | Description |
|---|---|
| war, death, famine, polution | Your most important servers. Only the IT employees are allowed to log onto these machines. |
| pride, greed, envy, wraith, lust, sloth | Less important servers. All members of the IT department are allowed to login onto these machines. |
| one, two, three, four, ... | Ordinary workstations. Only the real employees are allowed to use these machines. |
| trashcan | A very old machine without any critcal data. Even the intern is allowed to use this box. |
If you tried to implement these restrictions by separately blocking each user, you would have to add one -user line to each system's passwd for each user who is not allowed to login onto that system. If you forget just one entry, you could be in trouble. It may feasible to do this correctly during the initial setup, however you will eventually forget to add the lines for new users during day-to-day operations. After all, Murphy was an optimist.
Handling this situation with netgroups offers several advantages. Each user need not be handled separately; you assign a user to one or netgroup and allow or forbid logins for all members of the netgroup. If you add a new machine, you will only have to define login restrictions for netgroups. If a new user is added, you will only have to add the user to one or more netgroups. Those changes are independent of each other; no more ``for each combination of user and machine do...'' If your NIS setup is planned carefully, you will only have to modify exactly one central configuration file to grant or deny access to machines.
The first step is the initialisation of the NIS map netgroup. FreeBSD's ypinit does not create this map by default, but its NIS implementation will support it once it has been created. To create an empty map, simply type
ellington# vi /var/yp/netgroup
and start adding content. For our example, we need at least four netgroups: IT employees, IT apprentices, normal employees and interns.
IT_EMP (,alpha,test-domain) (,beta,test-domain)
IT_APP (,charlie,test-domain) (,delta,test-domain)
USERS (,echo,test-domain) (,foxtrott,test-domain) \
(,golf,test-domain)
INTERNS (,able,test-domain) (,baker,test-domain)
IT_EMP, IT_APP etc. are the names of the netgroups. Each bracketed group adds one or more user accounts to it. The three fields inside a group are:
The name of the host(s) where the following items are valid. If you do not specify a hostname, the entry is valid on all hosts. If you do specify a hostname, you will a realm of darkness, horror and utter confusion.
The name of the account that belongs to this netgroup.
The NIS domain for the account. You can import accounts from other NIS domains into your netgroup if you are one of unlucky fellows with more than one NIS domain.
Each of this fields can contain wildcards, see netgroup(5) for details.
Note: Netgroup names longer than 8 characters should not be used, especially if you have machines running other operating systems within your NIS domain. The names are case sensitive; using capital letters for your netgroup names is an easy way to distinguish between user, machine and netgroup names.
Some NIS clients (other than FreeBSD) cannot handle netgroups with a large number of entries. For example, some older versions of SunOS start to cause trouble if a netgroup contains more than 15 entries. You can circumvent this limit by creating several sub-netgroups with 15 users or less and a real netgroup that consists of the sub-netgroups:
BIGGRP1 (,joe1,domain) (,joe2,domain) (,joe3,domain) [...] BIGGRP2 (,joe16,domain) (,joe17,domain) [...] BIGGRP3 (,joe32,domain) (,joe33,domain) BIGGROUP BIGGRP1 BIGGRP2 BIGGRP3You can repeat this process if you need more than 225 users within a single netgroup.
Activating and distributing your new NIS map is easy:
ellington# cd /var/yp
ellington# make
This will generate the three NIS maps netgroup, netgroup.byhost and netgroup.byuser. Use ypcat(1) to check if your new NIS map are available:
ellington% ypcat -k netgroup
ellington% ypcat -k netgroup.byhost
ellington% ypcat -k netgroup.byuser
The output of the first command should resemble the contents of /var/yp/netgroup. The second command will not produce output if you have not specified host-specific netgroups. The third command can be used to get the list of netgroups for a user.
The client setup is quite simple. To configure the server war, you only have to start vipw(8) and replace the line
+:::::::::
with
+@IT_EMP:::::::::
Now, only the data for the users defined in the netgroup IT_EMP is imported into war's password database and only these users are allowed to login.
Unfortunately, this limitation also applies to the ~ function of the shell and all routines converting between user names and numerical user ids. In other words, cd ~user will not work, ls -l will show the numerical id instead of the username and find . -user joe -print will fail with ``No such user''. To fix this, you will have to import all user entries without allowing them to login onto your servers.
This can be achieved by adding another line to /etc/master.passwd. This line should contain +:::::::::/sbin/nologin, meaning ``Import all entries but replace the shell with /sbin/nologin in the imported entries''. You can replace any field in the passwd entry by placing a default value in your /etc/master.passwd.
WarningMake sure that the line +:::::::::/sbin/nologin is placed after +@IT_EMP:::::::::. Otherwise, all user accounts imported from NIS will have /sbin/nologin as their login shell.
After this change, you will only have to change one NIS map if a new employee joins the IT department. You could use a similar approach for the less important servers by replacing the old +::::::::: in their local version of /etc/master.passwd with something like this:
+@IT_EMP:::::::::
+@IT_APP:::::::::
+:::::::::/sbin/nologin
The corresponding lines for the normal workstations could be:
+@IT_EMP:::::::::
+@USERS:::::::::
+:::::::::/sbin/nologin
And everything would be fine until there is a policy change a few weeks later: The IT department starts hiring interns. The IT interns are allowed to use the normal workstations and the less important servers; and the IT apprentices are allowed to login onto the main servers. You add a new netgroup IT_INTERN, add the new IT interns to this netgroup and start to change the config on each and every machine... As the old saying goes: ``Errors in centralised planning lead to global mess''.
NIS' ability to create netgroups from other netgroups can be used to prevent situations like these. One possibility is the creation of role-based netgroups. For example, you could create a netgroup called BIGSRV to define the login restrictions for the important servers, another netgroup called SMALLSRV for the less important servers and a third netgroup called USERBOX for the normal workstations. Each of these netgroups contains the netgroups that are allowed to login onto these machines. The new entries for your NIS map netgroup should look like this:
BIGSRV IT_EMP IT_APP
SMALLSRV IT_EMP IT_APP ITINTERN
USERBOX IT_EMP ITINTERN USERS
This method of defining login restrictions works reasonably well if you can define groups of machines with identical restrictions. Unfortunately, this is the exception and not the rule. Most of the time, you will need the ability to define login restrictions on a per-machine basis.
Machine-specific netgroup definitions are the other possibility to deal with the policy change outlined above. In this scenario, the /etc/master.passwd of each box contains two lines starting with ``+''. The first of them adds a netgroup with the accounts allowed to login onto this machine, the second one adds all other accounts with /sbin/nologin as shell. It is a good idea to use the ALL-CAPS version of the machine name as the name of the netgroup. In other words, the lines should look like this:
+@BOXNAME:::::::::
+:::::::::/sbin/nologin
Once you have completed this task for all your machines, you will not have to modify the local versions of /etc/master.passwd ever again. All further changes can be handled by modifying the NIS map. Here is an example of a possible netgroup map for this scenario with some additional goodies.
# Define groups of users first
IT_EMP (,alpha,test-domain) (,beta,test-domain)
IT_APP (,charlie,test-domain) (,delta,test-domain)
DEPT1 (,echo,test-domain) (,foxtrott,test-domain)
DEPT2 (,golf,test-domain) (,hotel,test-domain)
DEPT3 (,india,test-domain) (,juliet,test-domain)
ITINTERN (,kilo,test-domain) (,lima,test-domain)
D_INTERNS (,able,test-domain) (,baker,test-domain)
#
# Now, define some groups based on roles
USERS DEPT1 DEPT2 DEPT3
BIGSRV IT_EMP IT_APP
SMALLSRV IT_EMP IT_APP ITINTERN
USERBOX IT_EMP ITINTERN USERS
#
# And a groups for a special tasks
# Allow echo und golf to access our anti-virus-machine
SECURITY IT_EMP (,echo,test-domain) (,golf,test-domain)
#
# machine-based netgroups
# Our main servers
WAR BIGSRV
FAMINE BIGSRV
# User india needs access to this server
POLUTION BIGSRV (,india,test-domain)
#
# This one is really important and needs more access restrictions
DEATH IT_EMP
#
# The anti-virus-machine mentioned above
ONE SECURITY
#
# Restrict a machine to a single user
TWO (,hotel,test-domain)
# [...more groups to follow]
If you are using some kind of database to manage your user accounts, you should be able to create the first part of the map with your database's report tools. This way, new users will automatically have access to the boxes.
One last word of caution: It may not always be advisable to use machine-based netgroups. If you are deploying a couple dozen or even hundreds of identical machines for student labs, you should use role-based netgroups instead of machine-based netgroups to keep the size of the NIS map within reasonable limits.
There are still a couple of things that you will need to do differently now that you are in an NIS environment.
Every time you wish to add a user to the lab, you must add it to the master NIS server only, and you must remember to rebuild the NIS maps. If you forget to do this, the new user will not be able to login anywhere except on the NIS master. For example, if we needed to add a new user ``jsmith'' to the lab, we would:
# pw useradd jsmith
# cd /var/yp
# make test-domain
You could also run adduser jsmith instead of pw useradd jsmith.
Keep the administration accounts out of the NIS maps. You don't want to be propogating administrative accounts and passwords to machines that will have users that shouldn't have access to those accounts.
Keep the NIS master and slave secure, and minimize their downtime. If somebody either hacks or simply turns off these machines, they have effectively rendered many people without the ability to login to the lab.
This is the chief weakness of any centralised administration system, and it is probably the most important weakness. If you do not protect your NIS servers, you will have a lot of angry users!
FreeBSD's ypserv has some support for serving NIS v1 clients. FreeBSD's NIS implementation only uses the NIS v2 protocol, however other implementations include support for the v1 protocol for backwards compatibility with older systems. The ypbind daemons supplied with these systems will try to establish a binding to an NIS v1 server even though they may never actually need it (and they may persist in broadcasting in search of one even after they receive a response from a v2 server). Note that while support for normal client calls is provided, this version of ypserv does not handle v1 map transfer requests; consequently, it can not be used as a master or slave in conjunction with older NIS servers that only support the v1 protocol. Fortunately, there probably are not any such servers still in use today.
Care must be taken when running ypserv in a multi-server domain where the server machines are also NIS clients. It is generally a good idea to force the servers to bind to themselves rather than allowing them to broadcast bind requests and possibly become bound to each other. Strange failure modes can result if one server goes down and others are dependent upon on it. Eventually all the clients will time out and attempt to bind to other servers, but the delay involved can be considerable and the failure mode is still present since the servers might bind to each other all over again.
You can force a host to bind to a particular server by running ypbind with the -S flag.
One of the most common issues that people run into when trying to implement NIS is crypt library compatibility. If your NIS server is using the DES crypt libraries, it will only support clients that are using DES as well. To check which one your server and clients are using look at the symlinks in /usr/lib. If the machine is configured to use the DES libraries, it will look something like this:
% ls -l /usr/lib/*crypt*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 13 Jul 15 08:55 /usr/lib/libcrypt.a@ -> libdescrypt.a
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 14 Jul 15 08:55 /usr/lib/libcrypt.so@ -> libdescrypt.so
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 16 Jul 15 08:55 /usr/lib/libcrypt.so.2@ -> libdescrypt.so.2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 15 Jul 15 08:55 /usr/lib/libcrypt_p.a@ -> libdescrypt_p.a
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 13018 Nov 8 14:27 /usr/lib/libdescrypt.a
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 16 Nov 8 14:27 /usr/lib/libdescrypt.so@ -> libdescrypt.so.2
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 12965 Nov 8 14:27 /usr/lib/libdescrypt.so.2
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 14750 Nov 8 14:27 /usr/lib/libdescrypt_p.a
If the machine is configured to use the standard FreeBSD MD5 crypt libraries they will look something like this:
% ls -l /usr/lib/*crypt*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 13 Jul 15 08:55 /usr/lib/libcrypt.a@ -> libscrypt.a
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 14 Jul 15 08:55 /usr/lib/libcrypt.so@ -> libscrypt.so
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 16 Jul 15 08:55 /usr/lib/libcrypt.so.2@ -> libscrypt.so.2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 15 Jul 15 08:55 /usr/lib/libcrypt_p.a@ -> libscrypt_p.a
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 6194 Nov 8 14:27 /usr/lib/libscrypt.a
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 14 Nov 8 14:27 /usr/lib/libscrypt.so@ -> libscrypt.so.2
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 7579 Nov 8 14:27 /usr/lib/libscrypt.so.2
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 6684 Nov 8 14:27 /usr/lib/libscrypt_p.a
If you have trouble authenticating on an NIS client, this is a pretty good place to start looking for possible problems. If you want to deploy an NIS server for a heterogenous network, you will probably have to use DES on all systems because it is the lowest common standard.
For questions about FreeBSD, e-mail
<questions@FreeBSD.org>.
For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.