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I thought I had gotten /home mounting via nfs from my server to clients properly. I do not think I do. If you are on the server and make a user, you cannot then go over to the client and log in as said user. Is there some other way to do this? Or am in the world of openldap etc?

Codejoy
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Mounting /home is not enough for a client to log on. In addition, the computer needs to know the username and password.

Username is traditionally stored locally on each computer in /etc/passwd, whilst password information is in /etc/shadow. The traditional Unix way to make this information available on other computers is the NIS Service, which makes this information on the server available over the network.

In the modern world NIS has a few shortcomings; it's made for a age where you could trust root on all systems in your network. That's probably not the case any more in most scenarios, so a directory service such as FreeIPA is probably a better bet.

vidarlo
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  • I appreciate this information. I inherited some servers and I am still learning how to be a sys admin. Two servers were working in this fashion and I had no idea how the user info was getting across. Nis and FreeIPA are things now I can hunt around for to try to figure this out. Does NIS work in place of or in conjunction with something like openldap? Or two totally diff things? – Codejoy Apr 19 '21 at 08:02