Solaris

Hi all,

I'm developing a script to handle the various actions involved with user admin as root:
Reset password
create a new users
change a users email address, etc

We're in the process of changing over from "telnet" to "SSH" to establish terminal sessions on our Solaris 9/10 servers.

The catch 22 situation I'm finding myself in is this:
Currently (telnet sessions) we reset passwords for users with "passwd -df user-id" command, and that forces the user to enter a new password at the next sign-on.

With SSH on the terminal emulator we're using, the user is prompted for a password BEFORE the session is established to the server. That means that the SSH session authenticates against the old password to the server, and only once a session has been established successfully, is the user prompted for his new password.

Part of the script being developed is to have a crude password generator that generates a password, reset the user-id with that password with a 1 day expiry period, and then forward the password to the user by email. This enables the user to enter a password for SSH to authenticate a session prior to prompting for password change.

Now my gazillion $ question: How do I do this without having to enter a password for the user? (Like "passwd user-id" and then enter a temporary password for that user-id.)

The problem is that by the time a call is logged to us, the user has NO idea of what his password was.

Thanks

Why do you need to get users to change their password just because you change the access protocol? Or is this only for new users?

Did the user not receive the email outside the system?

Porter, thanx for your repsonse.

The users are prompted for a password by the ssh client on their PC.
That's why we need to set a temp password for them, and then mail them that temp passwd to enable them to ssh and establish a session that will them prompt them to change the password.

To set a password for a user the command is (as root)
passwd user-id
passwd then prompts you for a password, and asks you to verify that again.

I don't want to go that route, as that means root has to assign those temp password by hand, which we don't want to do...

I'd like to use "passwd -?? user-id temp-passwd" to set the passwd from within the script.

Thanx