Ubuntu on a NIS network

[P Jones]

On 7/10/06, Robert Entner <ubuntu at mail1.entner.net> wrote:
> Hello Ubuntuers!
>
> We have a small NIS network (formerly yp) with approx. 30 clients and a
> server distributing /etc/passwd, /etc/group, and /etc/auto.master for
> distributing links to the home directories and some others. The goal is to
> have equal clients where everyone can login on each machine and have even
> rights.
>
> This was working pretty well using Suse, which sets the owner of audio/video
> devices to the user which logs in at the machine. In Ubuntu the only problem
> is that you have to add all users to the groups like cdrom, audio, video. Is
> there a Howto on this type of setup?
>
> The solution I can think of is to add all users in the nis:/etc/group
> entries. I would preferably allow everyone to use the "desktop stuff"
> without adding all users to this file and without touching the device
> permissions.
>
> Thank you,
> Burt

Hi Burt;

First some qualifications; I don't use Ubuntu anymore, and I don't use
SUSE, but at one time I used Fedora Core 4 on my server and Ubuntu
5.10 on my workstations, and attempted to get NIS setup and working.

You would have to look back through the ubuntu-list archives, but
essentially what I discovered and what was then confirmed by a few
people on the list was this; since Fedora and Ubuntu map groups and
GIDs differently, there wasn't a good way to leverage the features of
NIS - that is, to allow any user to log on to any machine without
having to do specific tweaks on every machine. As I recall it was the
audio/video stuff that made this issue stand out.

But I'll be interested to see if anyone has a good answer for you.
Please report back to the list if you figure something acceptable out.

-P