@martinbo, As mentioned by others, there are some options to ease the management of users and groups. Common ones are: 1 - SSSD, IPA, Centrify OS level integration so that application calls to the OS are handled by those apps to make queries to a central LDAP source. This requires a good deal of configuration, but it is a robust, enterprise-grade solution 2 - Manage your group and passwd files with automation tools like puppet, chef, etc. (mod once, "push out" changes to all hosts) 3 - Configure LdapGroupsMapping in HDFS so that hadoop services will do group lookups directly to LDAP. NOTE: If you intend on letting users run jobs directly on YARN, you will still need to create local users on each host with a NodeManager since contains require the os user to be present.
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