Using Oracle to mirror NIS maps & vice-versa

   Has anyone ever used Oracle to "mirror" NIS maps, as well as conversely? I work at a company as UNIX programmer and systems administrator in my group and we manage close to a thousand workstations (Suns, SGIs, Solbournes) and a few dozen servers. We also have 2 servers implemented as NIS masters (hence, two different domains). We would like to implement Oracle in such a way that the database has tables which essentially mirror the NIS maps (one table per map, say?). The scheme is that Whenever a change to a map occurs (via /var/yp/make map_name) the corresponding table in Oracle gets changed as well. A more difficult scheme would be to do the reverse (update the database table and the corresponding NIS map would automatically be updated), but my main concern is getting the former implemented first.

   Has anyone ever done this before? How feasible is it? What should I be concerned with in such a scheme? BTW, we also plan to create tables which do not have corresp. NIS maps but will be used to hold other useful info. The purpose for thsi whole scheme is to enable users and administrators to tap into the Oracle database as a global source of information on our workstations
(as well as PCs ... soon), as well as users of thos workstations,
instead of relying on several different sources for the information
(e.g. WingZ spreadsheets, FrameMaker documents, files out in UNIX,
as well as NIS maps). One could easily tap into the database via shell scripts or a variety of programming languages.

    Any opinions or help on this matter is greatly appreciated!

                                --John Received on Sat Aug 13 1994 - 16:54:11 CEST