"Patrick" <rhodan_nospam_5625@freakmail.de> wrote in message
news:3vdl7dF15fr56U1@uni-berlin.de...
> And another question:
>
> I want to reorg the passwd files. For some reasons - most of them
> political - I can't use NIS or ldap. So I collected all users and groups
> and have them set unique UID/GIDs. The are now in a file with the
> appropriate parameters. Is there anything you know of that can do the job
> of creating alle the users/groups with the parameters from the file onto
> distributed machines?

We're in the same situation.

> I started to write a script to do it but wondered if someone have already
> had the prob and has anything ready. That would keep me from inventing the
> same thing another time.

Probably better writing your own. Use something (scp probably, perhaps an
NFS mount)
to have your user/group information available to all machines, then a script
which creates the
accounts (perhaps from cron).
It might be easiest to create all the accounts on all the machines and lock
them on machines
where they are not required (to prevent the uids being allocated by
mistake). If you have 5.3
you can automate the password creation too, without resorting to expect.
The thing to be most careful of is ensuring the people who add the accounts
follow your
routine for adding users. This is the weak spot from our experience
(sysadmins adding ad hoc
users without thinking).