Carl Lowenstein wrote: > On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 9:35 AM, David Looney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Is there any way to set up login so that multiple username/password >> pairs can be used to log into the same account (preferably from gdm) ? >> >> The alternative seems to be to duplicate the same home directory/user >> settings for each user, but this seems quite wasteful when your talking >> many users. > > A few random thoughts: > > Things to ponder before saying "Yes, just give them all the same home > directory, owned by a group to which they all belong."
Another possibility. I worried a bit about getting all the permissions right for group access to work. > Do you intend that more than one of these multiple users will be > logged in at the same time? What happens if two or more of them are > modifying the same file? No. One person logged in at a time physically at the machine. Only remote access is via ssh with my publickey restricted to a few IP remote addresses. > Besides the simultaneous login problem, there are also accountability > issues. Who becomes responsible for changes that are made? Hopefully few changes will be made, as this is just an Ubuntu box that runs a browser to access the server to submitting information needed about DNA sequencing samples (but I'm now being forced to have unique username/passwords by policy --- people already have unique userids and passwords for webserver access to track samples/download results). > Could you solve this by symbolic links to a directory that holds the > common information? Just desktop settings need to be shared, basically, but that would still clutter up /home a bit. Giving different users a single account (i.e. the same UID/GID and home directory) as suggested by SJS is probably better (and easy to script). I never realized you could do that without causing problems. David Looney -- My country, always. My government when it deserves it. - Mark Twain -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
