Question

My central file server is running Redhat and I’ve configured this system to export shares via NFS and I manage user accounts with NIS. I’ve setup a couple of Ubuntu clients and realized, that the NIS users are not part of any of the standard Ubuntu groups. A local user usually belongs to the following groups:

$ groups
user adm cdrom dip plugdev lpadmin sambashare

My NIS users however only belong to the following groups:

$ groups
user

I could obviously add each NIS user to all the standard Ubuntu groups on each Ubuntu client that I’m using, but that requires me keep all systems up to date.

I was therefore thinking of adding the NIS users on the NIS server to the appropriate groups. Unfortunately, the group names and ids don’t match between Redhat and Ubuntu. So
while the plugdev group on a Ubuntu system maps to group ID 46 the same group might have the ID 47 on my Redhat server.

Therefore my question: How do I match / map user groups in the most efficient way? ideally, each new NIS user will automatically be in the correct ubuntu groups. (Not having the right group permissions results in not being able to smbmount, etc, …)

EDIT Ideally I would add each NIS user to a special NIS group and that would be translated on the Ubuntu clients to the groups adm cdrom dip plugdev lpadmin sambashare

Answer 1

a partial solution seems to be:

 $ sudo vi /etc/pam.d/common-auth

 # add line
 auth optional pam_group.so

Set group permissions for all authenticated users (not NIS specific)

 $ sudo vi /etc/security/group.conf

 # add line
 "*;*;*;Al0000-2400; audio,video,cdrom,plugdev,fuse"

any better solutions?