On 08-Dec-97 Darren Renaud wrote: > Is there a way to establish an email only account? Also is there a way > to add or remove a large amount of those accounts (if they can exist)? > I'm setting up a system for student email, and have to add or remove 40+ > accounts per semester. I'd like to limit the accounts to POP3 only, and > prevent those users from accessing telnet etc. >
I know that others have suggested setting the users' shells to /bin/false - that will disallow telnet and (unless you put /bin/false into /etc/shells) will also disallow ftp. If I may make a further suggestion: make the users' shells /usr/bin/passwd. That way, they can change their password by simply telnetting to your machine (and changing their password is all that they can do). Also, you may wish to create a directory under /home (for example, called /home/nologin) with mode 755 owned by root, and then set all the users' home directories to that instead of the default. (Of course, you can't do this if using something like qmail, which expects to be able to drop things into users' home directories) To ease the bulk creation of accounts, you should look in to the newusers utility. It does great things all at once. You may also look into the program pwgen, which generates potential passwords. (e.g. you could use pwgen in a script which generates a file for newusers) -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
