RE: Email only users, and Bulk User Adds/Removes

[Daniel Martin <martind@math.jhu.edu>]

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) 



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