I want to add a user who can only execute a few commands and nothing else, at the same time I have created a shared folder (group) where my files are present. I want the user to only execute the files in the shared folder and restrict him from reading it or opening it and so on.
These are the set of commands I am using to create a restricted user. After these commands I am changing the PATH in the .bash_profile file to $HOME/commands directory.
This is how it looked when I login from the user account
I have added the user to the group using this command: sudo usermod -a -G bbc testuser
Now when I change the home directory to the shared file group using usermod --home /path/to/new/directory testuser, it shows like this when I login through the new user
This has no restriction on the commands being used, although ls and cd commands wont run other commands like nano to see the file content works. I want to restrict this as well
So after this If I try to import a python file in the new user it says 'module not found', this same command works in the ec2-user or root user.
Please help me solve this issue.
Thank you
I'm struggling in creating an FTP user on a Linux server using the command line.
I installed vsftpd
Then i created a user using multiple commands for multiple times like
sudo adduser --home /home/testuser testuser --no-create-home
Added password to it,
Edited etc/vsftpd.conf file,
enabled chroot_local_user=YES,
Added user name to config files, etc etc. But none seems to work.
They are getting created as SFTP users. I disabled the SSH access and then it stopped for FTP too.
What all I need is to do is simply set up an FTP user and jail them to a path without SSH access.
Can anyone help?
I had gone through a lot of posts. But still no solution.
There are lot more FTP serves like vsftpd, ProFTP, and PureFTP.
But with vsftpd there are known issues. That's right. You can use ProFTP and I followed the same method using ProFTP. It worked.
Instead of trying vsftpd,
I used ProFTP and it worked. I followed the below steps and it worked.
ProFTP Setup in Linux:
Document Link
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-proftpd-on-ubuntu-12-04
sudo apt-get install proftpd (to install)
sudo apt-get remove proftpd (to uninstall)
Edit the ProFTP configuration file located at /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf to update specific settings
sudo vi /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf
Make sure the ServerName and MasqueradeAddress are set to the current machine’s Public or Elastic IP Address.
Set RequireValidShell to false. Set DefaultRoot to ~ to jail users to their home directories only.
ServerName "54.187.75.250"
ServerType standalone
MasqueradeAddress 54.187.75.250
RequireValidShell off
DefaultRoot ~
PassivePorts 50000 51000
<IfModule mod_facts.c>
FactsAdvertise off
</IfModule>
Creating an ftp user
Add a ftp user to the system
sudo useradd -m ftpuser (the -m option is to create a home directory for the user)
Set user’s password
sudo passwd ftpuser
At a later time, you may delete the user by executing
sudo deluser ftpuser
Test if FTP server is up and running from a remote machine, login using the id/pwd of the newly created ftpuser
Transfer files back and forth.
Restart FTP server
sudo service proftpd restart
sudo /etc/init.d/proftpd start
My linux user account has the rights to run a particular sudo command without a password prompt. I am trying to implements jenkins to run this command. It is set up to ssh as my user account on the box with the Publish Over SSH plugin.
When I am in the box $USER shows the correct user, but when I try to run "sudo {command}" (which runs without password when I am using that box normally with my user) it requires password. What is causing this behavior?
Because it is configured to do so. There is file /etc/sudoers specifying these rules and there is respective manual page describing how does this file and the roles work. It is probably a good start to read.
Background
My question seems simple, but it gets more complex really fast.
Basically, I got really tired of maintaining my servers manually (screams in background) and I decided it was time to find a way to make being a server admin much more liveable. That's when I found Ansible. Great huh? Sure beats making bash scripts (louder scream) for everything I wanted to automate.
What's the problem?
I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out what user my Ansible playbook will run certain things as. I also need the ability to specify what user certain tasks will run as. Here are some specific use cases:
Cloning a repo as another user:
My purpose with this is it run my node.js webapp from another user, who we'll call bill (that can only use sudo to run a script that I made that starts the node server, as opposed to root or my user that can use sudo for all commands). To do this, I need the ability to have Ansible's git module clone my git repo as bill. How would I do that?
Knowing how Ansible will gain root:
As far as I understand, you can set what user Ansible will connect to the server you're maintaining by defining 'user' and the beginning of the playbook file. Here's what I don't understand: if I tell it to connect via my username, joe, and ask it to update a package via the apt module, how will it gain root? Sudo usually prompts me for my password, and I'd prefer keeping it that way (for security).
Final request
I've scoured the Ansible docs, done some (what I thought was thorough) Googling, and generally just tried to figure it out on my own, but this information continues to elude me.
I am very new to Ansible, and while it's mostly straight-forwards, I would benefit greatly if I could understand exactly how Ansible runs, on which users it runs, and how/where I can specify what user to use at different times.
Thank you tons in advance
You may find it useful to read the Hosts and Users section on Ansible's documentation site:
http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks_intro.html#hosts-and-users
In summary, ansible will run all commands in a playbook as the user specified in the remote_user variable (assuming you're using ansible >= 1.4, user before that). You can specify this variable on a per-task basis as well, in case a task needs to run as a certain user.
Use sudo: true in any playbook/task to use sudo to run it. Use the sudo_user variable to specify a user to sudo to if you don't want to use root.
In practice, I've found it easiest to run my playbook as a deploy user that has sudo privileges. I set up my SSH keys so I can SSH into any host as deploy without using a password. This means that I can run my playbook without using a password and even use sudo if I need to.
I use this same user to do things like cloning git repos and starting/stopping services. If a service needs to run as a lower-privileged user, I let the init script take care of that. A quick Google search for a node.js init.d script revealed this one for CentOS:
https://gist.github.com/nariyu/1211413
Doing things this way helps to keep it simple, which I like.
Hope that helps.
My 2 cents:
Ansible uses your local user (eg Mike) to ssh to the remote machine. (That required Mike to be able to ssh to the machine)
From there it can change to a remote user if needed
It can also sudo if needed and if Mike is allowed. If no user is specified then root will be selected via your ~/.ansible.cfg on your local machine.
If you supply a remote_user with the sudo param then like no.3 it will not use root but that user.
You can specify different situations and different users or sudo via the playbooks.
Playbook's define which roles will be run into each machine that belongs to the inventory selected.
I suggest you read Ansible best practices for some explanation on how to setup your infrastructure.
Oh and btw since you are not referring to a specific module that ansible uses and your question is not related to python, then I don't find any use your question having the python tag.
Just a note that Ansible>=1.9 uses privilege escalation commands so you can execute tasks and create resources as that secondary user if need be:
- name: Install software
shell: "curl -s get.dangerous_software.install | sudo bash"
become_user: root
https://ansible-docs.readthedocs.io/zh/stable-2.0/rst/become.html
I notice current answers are a bit old and suffering from link rot.
Ansible will SSH as your current user, by default:
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/intro_getting_started.html#connecting-to-remote-nodes
Ansible communicates with remote machines over the SSH protocol. By default, Ansible uses native OpenSSH and connects to remote machines using your current user name, just as SSH does.
This can be overridden using:
passing the -u parameter at the command line
setting user information in your inventory file
setting user information in your configuration file
setting environment variables
But then you must ensure a route exists to SSH as that user. An approach to maintaining user-level ownership I see more often is become (root) and then to chown -R jdoe:jdoe /the/file/path.
In my 2.12 release of ansible I found the only way I could change the user was by specifying become: yes as an option at the play level. That way I am SSHing as the unprivileged, default, user. This user must have passwordless sudo enabled on the remote and is about the safest I could make my VPS. From this I could then switch to another user, with become_user, from an arbitrary command task.
Like this:
- name: Getting Started
gather_facts: false
hosts: all
become: yes # All tasks that follow will become root.
tasks:
- name: get the username running the deploy
command: echo $USER
become_user: trubuntu # From root we can switch to trubuntu.
If the user permitted SSH access to your remote is, say, victor, and not your current user, then remote_user: victor has a place at the play level, adjacent to become: yes.
What I'm basically trying to do is allow jenkins access my android-sdk-linux folder and all the sub-directories. My boss does not want to change permissions on the folder himself. I am supposed to do it during the build process. I have seen some examples that run some commands in the execute shell during the build process. Is there some commands that can I can run in that execute shell so that jenkins can have read write and execute authority on my android-sdk-linux folder?
As bcolfer said, you should be able to just run your shell commands with "sudo" in front of it. You will want to be sure that the user that started the Jenkins slave is a sudoer.
As root, run "visudo", this will open the /etc/sudoers file. At the bottom add a line similar to this if it is not a current sudoer:
jenkins ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
"Jenkins" being the user that started the slave.
OR
You could try adding the user to the group that owns that directory. IF you run "ls -l" you should be able to see the permissions and then the user, and the group that owns the directory. Once you know the group, as root run:
usermod -a -G group Jenkins
"Jenkins" being the user that started the slave, and "group" being the actual group name.
One possibility is to use sudo to run commands that specifically target those files. There are a bunch of ways to manage the sudo privileges limit and log what actions happen on those files.