Ideas for mapping users to specific uids

[Brad Alexander <storm16@gmail.com>]

I know the answer is going to be LDAP, but that's not really an option for me.

I have, at work, a number of boxes with various users spread across our network. And I have encountered this on several different jobs. In essence, say you have four users, e.g. user1, user2, user3 and user4...and for the sake of this problem, say there are 10 boxes, host 1 through host 5. User1 is the administrator for the network, so that person has accounts on all 5 boxes. User2 has an account on box 2, 4 and 5, user3 has accounts on 1, 2 and 4, user 4 has accounts on 2, 4 and 5, and box 3 is an NFS server.

What I would liike to do is set it up so user1 has uid 1000, user2, 1001, and so forth. Is there an easy way to set this up on my network such that when I create a user, that user can have the same uid across the board? Ideally, I would like to be able to subdivide the uid space so that, say, admins are always 1000-1050, dbas are 1051-1075, users are 2000-2100, etc.

I know LDAP can do this, but at work, it is not an option, at least in the short term...

Thanks,
--b