Puppet

Most Red Hat Enterprise Linux, at least releases 4 and 5, ship gpasswd-utility which allows management of entries in /etc/group which is exactly what usermod does. However, gpasswd has one big advantage over usermod: gpasswd does not require an entry for user to be added/deleted from a group to have an entry in /etc/passwd.

In an environment which relies on (e.g.) some bizarre LDAP setup (I’m forced to live with one at work), there might not be entries in /etc/passwd for users which are still require to have various rights granted by entries in /etc/group. So there might be a user called ‘foo’ who has not an entry in /etc/passwd, yet the same user needs to be in group ‘bar’ in /etc/group as the group ‘baz’ is used to control who are allowed to use ‘sudo’-command in the system.

Now I could of course just rewrite necessary bits and pieces on useradd.rb locally, but this seems to be a thing that might be useful for Puppet-community in general (well, at least to those who run RHEL). So, thus a feature request.