NAME

       netgroup - specify network groups

DESCRIPTION

       The  netgroup  file   defines  "netgroups", which are sets of (host, user, domain) tuples,
       used for permission checking when doing remote mounts, remote logins and remote shells.

       Each line in the file consists of a netgroup name followed by a  by  a  list  of  members,
       where a member is either another netgroup name, or a triple:

              (host, user, domain)

       where  the  host, user, and domain are character strings for the corresponding components.
       Any of the three fields can be empty, in which case it  specifies  a  "wildcard",  or  may
       consist of the string "-" to specify "no valid value". The domain field must either be the
       local domain name or empty for the netgroup entry to be used. This field  does  not  limit
       the  netgroup  or  provide  security.  The  domain field refers to the domain in which the
       triple is valid, not the domain containing the the trusted host.

       A gateway machine should be listed under  all  possible  hostnames  by  which  it  may  be
       recognized:

              gateway (server,,) (server-sn,,) (server-bb,,)

       The getnetgrent functions should normally be used to access the netgroup database.

FILES

       /etc/netgroup

SEE ALSO

       getnetgrent(3), exports(5), makedbm(8), ypserv(8)

WARNINGS

       The  triple  (,,domain)  allows  all  users  and machines trusted access, and has the same
       effect as the triple (,,). Use the host and user fields of  the  triple  to  restrict  the
       access correctly to a specific set of members.

BUGS

       The  Linux  libc5  does  not query the /etc/netgroup file directly, it only querys the NIS
       server for the groups. So the netgroup database must be stored in the form of a hashed dbm
       database just like the passwd(5) and group(5) databases.

       This  manpage  mentions getnetgrent(3), but it seems that manpage hasn't been written yet.
       Since getnetgrent() is part of GNU libc it might also be that it  is  documented  in  info
       format.

AUTHOR

       Thorsten Kukuk <kukuk@suse.de>