begin  quoting Steven Gauna as of Fri, Feb 01, 2008 at 03:55:16PM -0800:
> This is my first time posting to the mailing list.  Please let me know if
> I'm not doing something
> correctly. :X

Wrap your lines before 80 characters to avoid the long-line-short-line
effect, which is disconcerting for the reader. 72-76 is good, although
anything less than 80 won't give cause for complaint.

> I like the idea of a boot cd.  I wrote a little script that makes a user, a
> random password
> sets up ssh on a random port, and sends an email to a designated address
> with information
> regarding the IP of the machine, the password, username, and port of ssh.
> 
> This script requires the computer have internet connection, have an SMTP
> agent installed
> like postfix for example.

So you see this being used for setting up a "please log in an help me" 
help-script?

> So all you should have to do is get a nice boot cd running and configure the
> script into
> the proper run level.
> 
> I've posted the script if anyone is interested in looking at it or improving
> it, go right ahead. :)
> http://dextrous.homelinux.org/startup_script
> 
> hope it's useful.

What do you use that's bash-specific? <poke> Hm... $RANDOM? Is that it?

Why enforce being root? Maybe an appropriate user-account already
exists; run this script too often, and you'll clutter stuff up.

Having each exit code being a different value (to indicate what failed)
is sometimes a good idea.

No special characters in the password?

Why use a password? You're using ssh -- use authorized_keys.

Why the loop for the port? You're already using mod -- mod $RANDOM down
to the range, then add the base in.

Why muck about with modifying sshd_config? You're just going to mess
something up.  Wouldn't it be better to run sshd on an alternate port
and leave the existing ssh installation alone?

And you're stomping on the pre-existing port... bad.

And what's wrong with port 22 anyway?

Isn't it traditional to use the << TOKEN syntax to include large chunks
of text in a shell script, like the body of an email message?

You do not offer the user a chance to abort after telling them what
you want to do. This coupled with must-run-as-root makes this a
rather unfriendly tool... get rid of the little output there is, and
it's sort of dastardly.

-- 
Create me an account! No?
SUDO create me an account!
Stewart Stremler


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