[Beowulf] Building a 2 node cluster using mpich

[Mark Hahn]

>> 4.Finally, create identical user accounts on each node. In our case,
>> we create the user DevArticle on each node in our cluster. You can
>> either create the identical user accounts during installation, or you
>> can use the adduser command as root.
>
> better use NIS (or LDAP). So you only have to define the users once.

for a small cluster, LDAP is overkill (and NIS is, afaik, still insecure).
it's much easier to either have a single, shared NFS root 
(so /etc/{passwd,shadow,group} are inherently in sync) or else
just periodically rsync these files from a master node to all others.