UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Is there a very easy and configurable method to lock a user into their home directory?

I've checked on chroot() methodology.....but i'm not to excited about copying around ( or symlinking) libraries..binaries....etc.

Thought about altering the groups via chgrp...to only allow read access to $HOME. But that seems like alot of extra work.

I am hoping some of you more seasoned unix guru's out there, have a couple of tricks you can teach me!

BTW...the users are general.....will probably login via SSH...and will just drop of a few text files. I am allowing a group of individuals to log into one of my computers to test out the Linux OS. Mostly just pine....a little documentation..etc.

Thanks for your help!!

Probably the easiest way that I am aware of for a lightweight control would be using permissions.
I would assume that chmod'ing everything to a value like 700, so that even if they're in the same group, they can't read other's files by default. There would only be a few directoryies that you'd have to lock down to keep them from checking other people's directories, but they would still have read access to places like /bin, /etc, /usr... unless of course, you went all out and changed permissions, and perhaps added a few extra groups, for directory listing access to those dirs.

You'd also need to change their umask to 077 in their .profile (or whatever is used, based on the shell).

If this might work for you, I could provide a few examples...

And I agree - in most cases, chroot is a very large hassle for a small task.