Assignment for Week 5: User Account Management

Description

User account management has both technical and social aspects. In this assignment your group will create accounts on your system for all the other class members.

What you need to do

1. Create accounts on one or both of your agent instances for all the other people in the class (including me). Each account should be accessible to only its owner using the owner's provided public ssh identity key. You can create accounts by hand or use Puppet "user" resources, and other language features may make it easier to create multiple accounts with less Puppet code.
2. Decide what kinds of things you want to support for user accounts, like which shells you will provide default configurations for. Make sure that each account starts with a working shell and shell configuration. Other optional things you may want to consider as part of setting up accounts, depending on your operating system's support for such features, are:
   • Disk quotas
   • Resource limits (for memory and CPU usage)
   • Password expiration
   • Additional default configuration files for commonly-used software like mail readers, web browsers, X window system clients, etc.
3. Log in to each of your accounts provided by all the other groups. If your account doesn't initially seem to work, be sure to contact the other group to try to get things fixed.

What to turn in

1. Each of you individually needs to provide me with a summary report of the status of your accounts on instances run by all the other groups. Did you successfully arrange with the system administrators to get an account, and were you able to log in to it successfully? Note: If you do not provide a report by the due date, you individually will receive 0 points for this portion of the assignment.

   Note that this item is something where I want you all to do something individually and turn in something individually. However, your group will be evaluated on how many other people in the class can successfully access their accounts on your system.

2. Your group should also check log information to determine which accounts were accessed by the due date and provide a list showing the status of all the accounts you created. This will provide a useful cross-check for the individual reports.

Material for all of the above should be checked into your team git repository by class time on Monday, July 29. For an individual team member to receive credit for the assignment, they must have made at least one commit.

Class presentation/discussion

On Monday, July 29 we will take some time in class to have each group speak briefly about their experience with this assignment. Discuss how you arranged to set up accounts for other users on your system, and how those choices worked for you -- did everyone get accounts on your system who was supposed to? What problems did you encounter in creating accounts and how did you resolve them?

Evaluation

Your team's grade will be based on the proportion of people who report they are able to access their account on your system -- to get all 10 points, everyone who says they tried to set up an account on your system will also have to say they were able to log in to it successfully and that it was usable. If someone says they tried to get an account but couldn't, or the account was unusable, that will count against your group's point total. (On the other hand, people who don't report at all won't count against your total.)