On Mon, 16 Oct 2000, Jeremy Gaddis wrote: > > > Set root's shell to whichever you prefer, and set > > > the regular user's shell to /usr/bin/passwd. > > > > Yeah...I thought of this at first, but I need a solution that doesn't > > mess with the passwd file at all, as the passwd file is distributed to > > other machines on a regular basis, and the users actually need access to > > their shell there. :) > > I assume you'll have a cronjob of some sort running > on the "client" machines which snags the password > file off the "server" machine? No big deal, after > it copies the password file, run a script on it to > change their shells back to whatever you want. > Nothing sed, awk, or perl couldn't handle.
You seem to be thinking his master password file is stored on a machine other than the password-server machine. Try rereading his original request for help. You'll see that corrupting the master password file isn't such an intelligent thing to do. My suggestion follows: One possibility is to take advantage of NIS. On the server machine you have a second password file (passwd.nis or something) that is a "normal" password file. In the file /etc/passwd you have the lines root:0:0::/:/bin/bash +:0:0:::/bin/yppasswd and set the machine to get passwords from this NIS map (do a man on nsswitch.conf). In this way, you can have your cronjob scp the passwd.nis file around, but transparently substitute in this alternate shell when the users come in. I know I'm leaving out a LOT of details, but hopefully you can figure those out from this basic idea. Good luck. Damian Menscher -- --==## Grad. student & Sys. Admin. @ U. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ##==-- --==## <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> www.uiuc.edu/~menscher/ Ofc:(217)333-0038 ##==-- --==## Physics Dept, 1110 W Green, Urbana IL 61801 Fax:(217)333-9819 ##==--