(Send to the list and the sender)... Bruce P. Osler wrote:
Short answer: Yes.For starters - I'd like to contribute to the Cygwin love-fest going on. I think Cygwin is an awesome environment with huge benefits for folks working under windows. Today I'm interested in finding out wether I can use networked password services with the cygwin inetd. At work I would like to setup a series of computers with Cygwin tools all of which are running the Cygwin inetd. As there are a couple of hundred engineers in this environment the option of maintaining multiple /etc/passwd files is a bit onerous (if not unreasonable). All of these computers are already hooked into an environment where the user passwords are provided and managed centrally to an NT domain. Is there any way I can have Cygwin/inetd use the central domain password service for authentication?
Slightly longer answer: Create a passwd file with mkpasswd -d and store it on a common area. Then symlink /etc/passwd -> //<commonserver>/<commonshare>/passwd. Normally people worry about symlinking such files as /etc/passwd because it would be hard to boot up and log into the machine if the network were down. But you don't boot up nor log into Cygwin as per se, rather you log into Windows first.
You might wish to do this for /etc/group too.
You might wish to scriptize mkpasswd to call /bin/mkpasswd then perform some fix ups on the resulting passwd file before making it global.
You might wish to develop a script to insure the above symlink(s) are properly in place as well as say mounting //<commonserver>/<homeshare> -> /home, etc.
This is what I do and it works very well.
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