Shell Programming and Scripting

What OS are you using? I have never heard of the mkuser command. I usually use useradd to create users.
example:

Code:

useradd -u 25 -g staff -G ftp,users -m -d /export/home/newuser -c "newuser" -s /bin/bash newuser

to create users on more then one server I would put all my servers in a text file and do something like this:

Code:

for s in `cat servers`
do echo -e $s
ssh -q $s mkuser pgrp=srvadm gecos=Spears, Brittney auditclasses=ALL sugroups=system,security user01
done

I would add a line in there to set the password for the user.

As for NIS it is a Directory server like LDAP or Active Directory. NIS is not that secure and most UNIX and Linux environments have replaced NIS with LDAP. If you use a Directory server then you only need to change, add and remove an account in one place. The 50 servers you have to add accounts to would have to authenticate to the Directory server instead of locally.