Re: User management

[Jamie Wilkinson]

This one time, at band camp, Matthew Palmer wrote:
>This *feels* like a dirty hack to me; there has to be a more cfengine way,
>but I'm not sure which method would be nicest.  Any suggestions?  Google
>(surprisingly) didn't give me much love with queries like "cfengine create
>user" and "cfengine manage users".

For system users:

groups:

   user_X_exists = ( ReturnsZero(/bin/sh -c "/usr/bin/id -u X >& /dev/null")
)

shellcommands:

   !user_X_exists.redhat::

     "/usr/sbin/useradd -r -c X -s /sbin/nologin -d / -M -g nobody X

   !user_X_exists.debian::

     "/usr/sbin/adduser --system --gecos X --shell /bin/false --home /
--no-create-home --disabled-login --disabled-password --group nobody X"

I do it with macros, so I don't have to type all that crap for every system
user I need, and so things like home directory and default group can be
changed easily.

In a perfect world, this idiom would turn into a users: section, but alas
I've not yet had the time to write a patch.

For humans, I use LDAP, and cfengine just takes care of configuring the auth
system.