Configure UserAdm
The new program
is the most user visibile component of the UserAdm
system. It is also the only component of the system
that has extensive configuration options.
The sample configuration
file distributed with the UserAdm package is extensively
commented, and is its own best source of documentation.
What follows here are some additional notes.
Degree and course entries
The degree and course entries in the configuration file
determine where a user's home directory will be located
and what the group ID (GID) of that home directory will
be.
When a user runs the new program, they will match one
or more degree or course entries based on their registration
status. This value will then be passed to the adduser
program, which looks up the corresponding entry in the
passwd file. The template entries should have the following
format:
template_name:*NO_LOGIN*:gid:gid:description:home_directory:/bin/nosh
The UID for the template entry should be equal to the
GID. This GID will determine the GID of home directories
created for this course or degree specification.
The home directory for this entry is used to determine
the home directory for the user when their account is
created. There must be an entry in the passwd
file for each degree and course line
in the config file. new will exit
with an error message if it cannot find corresponding
entries in the passwd file.
It is possible for a user to match more than one degree
entry and/or more than one course entry. In
this case, the user will be asked to choose which entry
to use during the new process.
For example:
Using the default configuration file, if an undergraduate
student were to log into your system and run new, they
would at some point be presented with the following
choice:
You have been found to fit into more than one course/status
category.
Please choose the course or status from the following
list that fits your current situation/needs for getting
an account on this machine.
ugrad
student
Please type the status or course name (, e.g., ugrad):
Note: The special-status
entry in the configuration file can be used to provide
a course or degree even when a user's registration information
does not match any of the existing entries in your config
file. The comments in the sample
configuration file describe how to set up the special-status
program.
Guest List and Preapprove
If the autoapprove
line in the configuration file is commented out, most
users will have to have their accounts approve manually.
However, both users who have their usernames or BUIDs
listed in the guests file, and those who have
been pre-approved using the pre-approve
program, will have their accounts autoapproved in any
case.
The pre-approve program requires special
privileges, and is meant to be used to create accounts
for users who are not students, faculty, or staff of
Boston University. In general, if you want to have accounts
for specific users auto-approved, you should use the
guests facility.
The adduser program
The adduser program
distributed with UserAdm is a perl script, and can be
modified to meet the specific needs of your computing
environment. For instance, you could modify it so that
users in different degree or course categories received
different sets of initial dotfiles.
As distributed, the adduser script will look
for your default dotfiles in /usr/local/IT/skel. You
can change this location by editing the following line
in the adduser script:
$skeldir = "/usr/local/IT/skel";
Note
Before looking in skeldir,
the adduser script will copy ~new/Cshrc
and ~new/Login into the user's
home directory as .cshrc
and .login.
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