Friday, February 8, 2008

Simple Linux Mods For Shell Script To Disable User Accounts

Hey there,

Yesterday, we posted a huge chunk of code getting the latest version our script to disable or delete user accounts. So, in the interest of keeping this page from becoming way too long, I'm just going to post the "diff" today. I quote the term diff, because I'm using it very loosely ;)

For the astute reader, I also noted a few missing single ticks on two lines in yesterday's script and have modified that post. Strangely enough, after repeated testing to make sure I was still all there, Solaris Unix doesn't seem to care (???) RedHat Linux picked it up right away though!

The modifications necessary to make the manual part of this version of our user disabling/deleting shell script are actually quite refreshing. While Solaris still insists that you unpack the utmp struct in /var/adm/wtmpx in order to get any year information from login monitoring commands, Linux provides this information for you with the "lastlog" command.

Yes, the modification is really that simple :)

So, without further ado, I've laid out the chunks of old code from yesterday, followed by the uncommented code that you should replace it with when running this on Linux. I put the two different places you'll need to make a change, in order, from top to bottom, as that seems normal to me ;)

You'll notice that the script's output is slightly different (and actually more conversational in tone), but, for our purposes, it doesn't need to be modified. We're still at the stage where we want to do a visual double-check.

Enjoy,


Creative Commons License


This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

*** This section was in yesterday's script, but I've
*** changed the RedHat variable to be the lastlog
*** program instead of the /var/log/wtmp file

# $wtmpx_file_loc = "/var/adm/wtmpx"; # For Solaris
$wtmpx_file_loc = "/usr/bin/lastlog"; # For RedHat

*** The only other difference is a big chunk of code, but
*** actually a much simpler solution to implement in Linux

*** The Old Solaris Code - You should delete, or comment
* out this entire section and replace it with the new
* code below on Linux systems
*
* $template = "A32 A4 A32 l s s2 x2 l2 l x20 s A257 x";
* $recordsize = length(pack($template,( )));
* open(WTMP,$wtmpx_file_loc) or die "Unable to open wtmpx:$!\n";
* while (read(WTMP,$record,$recordsize)) {
* if ( $wtmpx_counter == 1 ) {
* print ".";
* $wtmpx_counter = 500;
* $wtmpx_total++;
* }
* ($ut_user,$ut_id,$ut_line,$ut_pid,$ut_type,$ut_e_termination,
* $ut_e_exit,$tv_sec,$tv_usec,$ut_session,$ut_syslen,$ut_host)=
* unpack($template,$record);
* push (@wtmpx_uv, "$ut_user ".scalar localtime($tv_sec));
* $wtmpx_counter--;
* $wtmpx_total++;
* }
*
*** End of the old Solaris code you should comment out or delete

* The substitute code for your Linux Shell Script
*
open(WTMP, "lastlog|") or die "can't open $wtmpx_file_loc: $!";
@rhwtmp = <WTMP>;
close(WTMP);
foreach $rhwtmp (@rhwtmp) {
if ( $wtmpx_counter == 1 ) {
print ".";
$wtmpx_counter = 500;
$wtmpx_total++;
}
push (@wtmpx_uv, $rhwtmp);
$wtmpx_counter--;
$wtmpx_total++;
}
*
* End of the substitute code - a lot easier to understand.


, Mike