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 POSIX

gshadow

GSHADOW(5)						   File Formats and Conversions 						GSHADOW(5)

NAME

       gshadow - shadowed group file

DESCRIPTION

       /etc/gshadow contains the shadowed information for group accounts.

       This file must not be readable by regular users if password security is to be maintained.

       Each line of this file contains the following colon-separated fields:

       group name
	   It must be a valid group name, which exist on the system.

       encrypted password
	   Refer to crypt(3) for details on how this string is interpreted.

	   If the password field contains some string that is not a valid result of crypt(3), for instance ! or *, users will not be able to use a
	   unix password to access the group (but group members do not need the password).

	   The password is used when a user who is not a member of the group wants to gain the permissions of this group (see newgrp(1)).

	   This field may be empty, in which case only the group members can gain the group permissions.

	   A password field which starts with an exclamation mark means that the password is locked. The remaining characters on the line
	   represent the password field before the password was locked.

	   This password supersedes any password specified in /etc/group.

       administrators
	   It must be a comma-separated list of user names.

	   Administrators can change the password or the members of the group.

	   Administrators also have the same permissions as the members (see below).

       members
	   It must be a comma-separated list of user names.

	   Members can access the group without being prompted for a password.

	   You should use the same list of users as in /etc/group.

FILES

       /etc/group
	   Group account information.

       /etc/gshadow
	   Secure group account information.

SEE ALSO

       gpasswd(5), group(5), grpck(8), grpconv(8), newgrp(1).

shadow-utils 4.5						    01/25/2018								GSHADOW(5)