Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

What would be the Best practices to sync UID/GID between 2 AIX systems?

Restore of /etc/passwd and /etc/group or anything else?

What about the filesystems where the UID/GID may get messed up in the ownership/group permissions?
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Do both systems have the same amount of users?

Your first bet is, to sync the GIDs, then the UIDs.

Once you sync them, on your target system, you should probally do a 'find / -user ' and set all those files to a certain UID.

I also recommend you to do a reboot on your target machine, since your process table may be impacted with various file changes.

Good luck
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Originally posted by: grukrz1

don't forget about following two files:

/etc/security/passwd
/etc/security/user

maybe you can also try with ITDS 6.0 (LDAP)?

http://www.ibm.com/servers/aix/whitepapers/ldap_client.pdf
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg247165.pdf

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/directory-server/
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/sysmgmt/products/support/IBMDirectoryServer.html

server version for AIX can be downloaded from:
http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/download/preconfig.jsp?id=2007-03-07+16%3A13%3A31.231209R&S_TACT=104CBW71&S_CMP=

ITDS Client is also included on AIX installation CDs.

I am using IBM Tovili Direcotry Server 6.0 - it works quite ok with ssl.
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Pardon me for saying so but "best practices" is just a nice way of saying "herd instinct". Your job is to figure out for yourself what fits your environment and let everybody else worry about their own problems.

That being said you have two basic approaches - manual and automatic. If the product of the numbers of servers times the number of users is "relatively small" (pick your own small number) then a pencil and paper will do nicely. Keep a listing with all your users on it and assign new numbers as required and spell out the uid on each system when you create them. Don't laugh, all the rest of you, it works. Otherwise you're looking at a directory system of some kind, OpenLDAP being the classic open source example. IBM makes a directory server somewhere under the Tivoli umbrella as well. For those less fortunate there's also, you should pardon the expression, Active Directory. Use of a directory server offers both the pain and delight of integration with non-AIX and even non-UNIX systems, if that's worth anything to you.

HTH

Jim Lane
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

"If the product of the numbers of servers times the number of users is "relatively small" (pick your own small number) then a pencil and paper will do nicely. Keep a listing with all your users on it and assign new numbers as required and spell out the uid on each system when you create them"

Agreed! This is the manual approach I would follow too!
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