usermode suite on Red Hat

[George Farris]

On Sun, 2004-31-10 at 19:26 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Does anyone have some insight into the use of Red Hat's usermode suite
> in Ubuntu? Particularly security and OS integration issues. I've put
> tarballs/specfiles of their latest packages up on people, and (lightly)
> tested it out on my system.
> 
>   http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~jdub/usermode/
> 
> libuser provides a standard (librarised!) interface to administration of
> user and group accounts, with backends for standard files, shadow, ldap,
> kerberos and sasl. On top of that, it provides a bunch of standard admin
> apps (like chsh, passwd, usermod, etc) that use libuser to do their work
> - very handy. It has a Python module to boot. (I think libuser would be
> useful even if we didn't take on the usermode stuff.)
> 
> usermode provides a bunch of GUI foo, 'consolehelper' and 'userhelper',
> which lets you run configured applications with superuser privileges.
> Kinda like sudo only different. ;-)
> 

We have used this at work here with Fedora, it is extremely handy.  Now
that we have replaced Fedora with Ubuntu in the labs I would really like
to see this added.  It is great being able to just reconfigure
authentication like this.  I'm now faced with configuring all the
nsswitch, ldap, pam crap by hand, yech.


-- 
George Farris   farrisg at mala.bc.ca   Do you Ubuntu?  You should!
Network and Technical Services
Malaspina University-College