remote user administration

Hello, I inhearited several solaris machines (read that about 30 of them) and have a need to be able to manage the user accounts remotely.... Currently the machines all have the same users but not exactly the same spelling (each machine was locally managed before and thus every single passwd/shadow file are different. Im not a unix sysadmin by trade, I am a network security guy with a unix background and am not a complete idiot when it comes to sysadmin however im not sure how to remotely manage these machines (just the user accounts) since they were each locally maintained before, without rebuilding each passwd/shadow file manually.... Anyone have any ideas? These machiens are all remote (several locations around the US) and on private IP space but I have access to all via lan to lan VPN....

Thanks in advance

William

Several different ways - if you are looking for 'one-stop shopping'. Some of these may not work - it matters what version of the OS each server is at.

NIS +
Adminsuite
More NIS+
Kerberos
SEAM

That should get you started...

get the most accurate/correct copy of /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow from 1 of the servers and propagate that to the rest of the machines ... make sure your users know that they are to use the same account from that point forward to login to all the servers .... then migrate them to NIS+ (or whichever option you like) .... and then remove the local server accounts ....

or .....

create your NIS+ environment now (or whichever option you like) ... create the user accounts like they're supposed to be done ... set the passwords ... have the users login to a test machine that doesn't have their local accounts but references NIS+ ... if that works ... migrate them over to NIS+ completely ... then remove the local accounts ...

:cool: