Cronjob for root password change. Post: 302903556

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Cronjob for root password change. Post 302903556 by Perderabo on Wednesday 28th of May 2014 11:27:53 AM

05-28-2014

Administrator Emeritus

There are quite a few objections to this entire approach. It is possible the the ap team will need to install a job in root's crontab. This would guarantee that they see your code. It also it means your "crontab -r" could be dangerous. If you must go down this path you can partially address your own objection. Switch to "usermod -p" and hard code the encrypted password. This is still terrible for security but it does beat hard coding the plaintext password.

But here is another approach for your consideration. Define a group called, perhaps, "bigshots". Add a line to /etc/group putting the ap team in the bigshots group. Now add a line like this:

Code:

%bigshots ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

to /etc/sudoers. Show the ap team how to use sudo to gain root power. And finally write a script to remove the bigshots line from both /etc/sudoers and /etc/group. This should be easy because we are using a screwy word like "bigshots" which probably will not collide with any other line in either file.

And the final touch: use the "at" command rather than "cron" to schedule the script at the appropiate time.

Perderabo

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LEARN ABOUT OSX

dsenableroot

dsenableroot(8) 					    BSD System Manager's Manual 					   dsenableroot(8)

NAME

     dsenableroot -- enables or disables the root account.

SYNOPSIS

     dsenableroot [-d] [-u username] [-p password] [-r rootPassword]

DESCRIPTION

     dsenableroot sets the password for the root account if enabling the root user account.  Otherwise, if disable [-d] is chosen, the root
     account passwords are removed and the root user is disabled.

     A list of flags and their descriptions:

     -u username
	      Username of a user that has administrative privileges on this computer.

     -p password
	      Password to use in conjunction with the specified username.  If this is not specified, you will be prompted for entry.

     -r rootPassword
	      Password to be used for the root account.  If this is not specified for enabling, you will be prompted for entry.

EXAMPLES

     -dsenableroot
	      Your username will be used and you will be queried for both your password and the new root password to be set to enable the root
	      account.

     -dsenableroot -d
	      Your username will be used and you will be queried for only your password to disable the root account.

     -dsenableroot -u username -p userpassword -r rootpassword
	      The supplied arguments will be used to enable the root account.

     -dsenableroot -d -u username -p userpassword
	      The supplied arguments will be used to disable the root account.

Mac OS								  August 08 2003							    Mac OS