Easiest way to replicate users between two (or more) servers?

Question

I've got two webservers which takes part in a load balanced setup. The two webservers are in other words mirrors of each other.

As it is right now I'm synchronizing data between these two servers using lsyncd + csync2. Directories and files, along with ownership and permissions, are thus replicated between the two servers upon create, update and delete.

However, when I add a user to one of the servers I need to manually add that users with the same UID (and GUI) on the other server.

What is the easiest way to make sure that when I add a new user on server A, that user is also created on user B with the same UID + GID? Do I really need to set up LDAP and do all the work related to that; or is there an easier way to achieve this?

Alright :-D Does LDAP mean that ALL accounts on both systems gets centralised? What happens if i install apache on both servers, but each server assigns the automatically generated apache account different uids? — sbrattla, Jan 10 '13 at 07:32
You can have it so that only accounts that don't exist locally are looked up via LDAP. — Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams, Jan 10 '13 at 07:52

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 10 '13 at 10:15

2

LDAP is the easiest way to do so. Accounts that should be the same on both systems will be added to the LDAP server, and per-server accounts should be created locally instead.

answered Jan 10 '13 at 10:15

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams

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Easiest way to replicate users between two (or more) servers?

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