Re: Freeze accounts

[John Hasler <jhasler@newsguy.com>]

Lisi Reisz wrote:
> The OP is trying to lock a large batch of students (I think 3 or 4
> figures) out for the duration of the vacation.  Two students have to
> be left with access.  But to lock each of the others out individually
> would be a big deal, and the OP is looking for a method that would
> enable him to lock them out as a bunch.  They all belong to the same
> group, including the two who still have to have access.

Write a trivial script to use chsh to change every group member's shell
to nologin and then change the two special ones back by hand or provide
a skip file.

A clever script would save each user's current shell to a file so that
another similar script (or the same script called with different
options) could read from the file and change it back.

You may also want to log out all of the to-be-locked-out users and kill
all their processes.  "man pkill", "apt-cache show slay".

A single fairly simple script can do all of this.  It's the sort of
thing that Unix admins were expected to know how to write.
-- 
John Hasler