SUMMARY: Software to manage user accounts
Sheryl Coppenger
sheryl at seas.gwu.edu
Tue Jun 4 06:38:13 AEST 1991
Sorry for the delay in summarizing, but I was hoping that more
packages would turn up. As it turns out, more than half of
the replies to my query consisted of "me too"s from 3 continents.
This is what I have found:
1) Mcp - got good reviews from people using it, but
they made significant mods. Mcp and the diskhog2
should be available at your local comp.sources.unix
ftp site. Mcp does not support YP/NIS in the
version popularly available.
2) ACMAINT - Developed at Purdue, this package has its
own daemon and does not require YP/NIS for distribution
of data bases. Get a copy of the overview paper
from harbor.ecn.purdue.edu in ~ftp/pub/ACmaint.ps.Z.
The beta version also can be ftpd from that location.
3) Moira - Part of the Athena Project. I sent a request
for information to info-athena at athena.mit.edu last
Thursday morning and haven't received a reply yet.
Word on the street is that it's a good package but
requires a lot of maintenance (2 full-time people
at one site I heard). Also requires purchase of
Ingres data base, which is not cheap.
4) Asmodeus - developed at Oregon State about the same
time as ACMAINT and is mentioned in the ACMAINT
paper. It is similar in concept to ACMAINT but
uses multiple daemons. See the ACMAINT paper for
more information.
Unfortunately, none of these packages (except mcp) is what I
had in mind. Even mcp will require a lot of changes if we use it.
I expect we'll wind up upgrading our current ksh scripts, possibly
rewriting the whole in PERL.
There was a lot of discussion in the ACMAINT article about the
desirability of doing away with YP/NIS. In my previous job we
avoided YP like the plague because even the vendor told us it
was a resource hog. Considering that we were writing realtime
applications, that was probably a good choice. In this environment,
however, YP/NIS doesn't seem to be that bad. At any rate, it's way
down on the hog list. If anybody wants to respond with their
YP/NIS experiences pro/con, feel free.
Many thanks to those who did reply with package suggestions, and
good luck to those who also were searching.
--
Sheryl Coppenger SEAS Computing Facility Staff sheryl at seas.gwu.edu
The George Washington University (202) 994-6853
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