CNT5605 - 2015 Fall
Assignment 5
Journals Due Monday, October 19, at the beginning of class.

Assignment: Users

  1. You have received a new batch of distinguished users; their basic information is located in newusers.tar. Inside of the tar file, there is a file called "newusers.txt" which contains a colon-separated entry for each user: the username, the uid, the GECOS information, and the user's preferred shell. Also in the tar file you will find a public key for each of these users in the subdirectory pubkeys/.
  2. Please add these users to your Debian machine as local users (you might to verify that no name clashes occur, though, before you proceed!) Create home directories on your Debian box with the usual files from /etc/skel, but put the home directories in /home/users/USERNAME/, not just /home/USERNAME. Each user should have his own group, where the group id matches the user id. Don't assign passwords to these accounts; instead, set it up so that the users can login using the public key provided in the tar file.
  3. Please add a test user to the newusers.txt with a public key for whom you also have the corresponding private key and verify that you can ssh into this test user's account, and that all permissions and directories are set up correctly for that user from within that okay.
  4. Create a /scratch/USERNAME/ directory for each user, and make sure that it is owned by the correct user and has the correct group number.



A journal is due for this assignment. Make sure that you document in your journal all of the steps that you went through, following the guidelines on the class home page.

Please turn in a printed copy of this assignment at the beginning of class on Tuesday, October 19.