In addition to being a researcher and backend web developer, I’ve also worn the system administrator hat for a number of years. While the likes of LDAP, Active Directory, NIS, and their ilk can work quite well for managing medium-to-large networks, I’ve more often been tasked with managing small-scale (< 20 machines) heterogeneous Linux networks, where deploying LDAP with full Kerberos authentication would be overkill. Typical requirements I’ve encountered in small lab settings are simple user account and home folder sharing, and (relatively) similar package installations.

With this in mind, I did what probably every sysadmin in the same situation would do: scrape together a simple set of scripts to handle basic file synchronization for me. Specifically, I noticed two prevalent requirements among config files being synced:

• machines and/or distros have a common header or footer that must be included (e.g., a list of system users in /etc/passwd), and

• specific machines (e.g., servers) shouldn’t have some files synced with the rest of the machines (e.g., file shares might be different on a server).

Thus, Poor Man's LDAP was born.

While nothing more than a collection of scripts–no different than what many other sysadmins have implemented, in all likelihood–they will hopefully be of use for those who, like me, are graduate students or otherwise non-full-time sysadmins that don’t have time to do things the “right” way.

I’m dogfooding pmldap on my research lab’s network, where we (currently) have 5 Fedora machines (various versions between 10 and 16) and 5 Debian machines (all on stable). Since my recent patch, pmldap now supports groups, which are useful for running yum commands only on the Fedora machines and apt commands on only the Debian boxes. Files being synchronized include: fstab, group, hosts, hosts.allow, hosts.deny, passwd, shadow, and sudoers.

Also in the repo are a few convenience tools that I’ve found useful:

• authorize-machine bootstraps a machine by setting up ssh keys

• setup bootstraps config files from a remote machine so they can be merged with the desired additions

• cmd runs an arbitrary command on all machines (or a particular group of machines)

• useradd is a feature-incomplete reimplementation of the native useradd command that works on local passwd, shadow, and group files to add new users that can later be synchronized across the network

Since I hadn’t stumbled across something of this scope to fit the small-scale-network use case, I’m hopeful that pmldap will be of use to anyone in a similar situation.

You’ll find it on gitub here.