CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxauthenticationsshcentosuser-accounts
Geni
Geni

Reputation: 707

How to grant access without setup account in CentOS

I have a sudo account (not root) on several CentOS servers. We would like to share the cluster with other uses who do not have an account for research purpose. (By share I mean users can reserve a time slot to use the cluster exclusively.) But setup an account in the OS for each user is too annoying. Is there a good way to grant them authority to read/write/execute their own files during a certain period of time? I am thinking something like temporary username and password that they can use to login through some interface (like a webserver) I offered. And the username and password will expire after when their reservation. Any idea?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 250

Answers (1)

Mark O'Connor
Mark O'Connor

Reputation: 77981

You can share your unix user account among several users, by using SSH key authentication.

In a nutshell, each user generates a public/private key combination. The allowed public keys are then listed in the following file on the shared unix acount:

$HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys

I'm not aware of a mechanism to control when users are allowed to login. Presumably one could have a cronjob that swaps different versions of the authorized_keys file, dependent on the time of day. (Seems like over engineering the solution, users can easily over-ride this kind of restriction).

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Upvotes: 1

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