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On Thu, 29 Jul 1999, Steven Schmidt wrote:
Re: Putting people on hold
From: Jason Englander
Date: Thursday, August 5, 1999
Time: 12:23:21 pm
> Hi All,
>
> I have a Linux box and currently testing Optigold with driving the user
> maint.
>
> How are people handling putting a customer on hold.
>
> Do you remove their logon from the passwd file?
> Are you changing the password to something they would never use?
> or
> Are you using a script to remove the password of the user from the passwd
> file but leave the user entry there?
>
> Cheers
> Steve.
I have the Telnet scripting run "passwd -l login" which makes their
encrypted password unencryptable. It puts a ! in front of their password
in /etc/shadow So they can't get online, pop their mail, etc., but the
account is still there.
To take them off of hold run "passwd -u login"
Mind you, sendmail will still accept mail for this account, but if
they're not on hold for too long, their mail spool shouldn't hog up too
much space - unless they were subscribed to a large number of mailing
lists, or a family member likes to send them 20 meg attachments every day.
Before Optigold I just added a - in front of their login name to
/etc/passwd (with a text editor). This _would_ prevent them from getting
mail while on hold. But every way I tried to get that automated was too
scary. ie. I wrote a Perl script to do it for me, but it had to re-write
/etc/passwd each time. As unlikely as that is, if the machine died, the
power went out, or whatever while it was copying the new copy over the old
copy - there goes a few thousand accounts.
passwd -l may not be availalable with your flavor of Linux (never checked
other distributions), but it works fine under Slackware 3.3 through 4.0
Jason
--
Jason Englander <jason@interl.net>
Systems Administrator - InterLink L.C.
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