[olug] remote password changes

[webtrekker at cox.net]

Hi Will,

Security isn't a major concern, all of the machines are in an isolated network.  Mainly I would like to be able to have a list of servers and reference that list with a script that would then ssh to each in turn and change one users password on each. 
I don't relish the idea of spending all day ssh'ing to each machine to do this by hand.  

I will be experimenting with your ideas today.  Thanks!

---- Will Langford <unfies at gmail.com> wrote: 
> not overly secure, but you can either have a sudo account that you log
> into... and have your ssh connection spawn a password change script... ie:
> 
> ssh passchangeuser at host password_change.sh targetuser targetpassword
> 
> Where password_change.sh is a front end to passwd.
> 
> Naturually, if you're concerned about `ps aux` on either server (ppl seeing
> the running processes), you'll need to have some kind of
> encryption+ascii_conversion package for the "targetpassword" parameter
> (rather than passing the plain text).  A simple and not so effective example
> would be to pass it through rot13 on both ends.
> 
> Another option is to do an scp to passchangeuser's account that puts a file
> (say, that's named targetuser and contains the new password inside) in a
> special directory (/home/passchangeuser/newinfo ?) and a cron task that
> constantly looks for new files in that directory and does the passwd command
> to change things as appropriate.  This way the user's password isn't
> transfered plain text and you don't have to worry about `ps aux` people.
> 
> No script examples in this email, kinda too busy to actually go about a full
> blown example.
> 
> -Will
> 
> 
> On 5/31/06, webtrekker at cox.net <webtrekker at cox.net > wrote:
> >
> > Hi All,
> >
> > I am trying to write a script that will reference a list of machine names
> > and then connect to each one through ssh to change a users password.
> >
> > SSH can connect to each server without prompting for a password
> > (authorized_keys).
> > I am not a very good script writer, so any help would be greatly
> > appreciated.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Patrick
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