
yppasswd-0.3
------------

This is my yppasswd package. The daemon is written entirely from scratch.
It works okay for me, but please check it out with DEBUG enabled before
you put it in a real-life situatuion. Losing a password file is a
nasty thing.  The client is from Theo de Raadt's NIS package for NetBSD
(ported to Linux by Swen Thuemmler's).  I simply fixed a bug, and
added AUTH_UNIX style authentication (for what it's worth).

Version 0.2 of yppasswdd also has support for shadow passwords, thanks
to Charles Lopes <tjarls@infm.ulst.ac.uk>. Edit the Makefile to enable
support for shadow passwords.


I have only tested the daemon with NYS - I don't have a working set
of old-style YP binaries at the moment. 


The server currently relies on a Makefiles residing in the /var/yp/<domain>
directories to rebuild the passwd maps. After updating /etc/passwd, the
daemon returns a success notification to the client, and forks off a child
that invokes /usr/sbin/yp.pwupdate. This script or program should rebuild
all NIS maps that depend on the password information in /etc/passwd. It
should certainly use a resonable locking mechanism to prevent concurrent
update access to the NIS maps. A sample script is provided, and should
work with the Makefile that comes with NYS.


To test yppasswdd, compile it with the DEBUG option. The daemon will then
leave the passwd file in /etc alone, and use /tmp/passwd instead.


The yppasswdd server and is covered by the GNU GPL version 2. The yppasswd
client is covered by Theo de Raadt's original license, to be found in
yppasswd.c.


Olaf Kirch, <okir@monad.swb.de>
Sept. 1994.
