[wplug] passwd file

[Kuzman Ganchev]

On Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 12:06:31PM -0400, Chris wrote:
> 
> I have a lot of system users that I don't what to be able to log on locally.
> I know that I can use usermod -s /sbin/nologin username, but I don't want to
> do that for every user.  Can I just edit the passwd file manually, or are
> there more files that need to be changed?

I think that this is in the passwd file and nowhere else; at least I
think that's the case on Debian. I remember there being locking issues
with editing a passwd file by hand, but I can't find a reference to it
in the passwd man pages. Does anyone know where a reference to this
might be? Google gave me FreeBSD's locking info, but nothing on Linux.

What I did find in passwd(1) was:

   Account maintenance
       User  accounts  may be locked and unlocked with the -l and
       -u flags.  The -l option disables an account  by  changing
       the   password  to  a  value  which  matches  no  possible
       encrypted value.  The -u option re-enables an  account  by
       changing the password back to its previous value.

Although I'm not sure that's what you want, especially if you're
running sshd. If you are running sshd, you need to edit
/etc/ssh/sshd_config, otherwise someone with an authorized_keys file
could:

ssh -l username yourmachine bash

See the sshd_config(5) manual for details. 

Kuzman