Csuite 1.1 user account structure

Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2000 18:16:35 -0300 (ADT)
From: Michael Smith <michael@csuite.ns.ca>
To: csuite-setup@chebucto.ns.ca
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Return-Path: <csuite-setup-mml-owner@chebucto.ns.ca>

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On Tue, 13 Jun 2000, Kenneth Applegate wrote:

> aa002 don't seem to be installed directly under /opt/csuite/home, but are
> located respectively in /opt/csuite/home/01/aa001 and
> /opt/csuite/home/02/aa002, with 01/ and 02/ being owned by root. Is this
> meant to be the start of several separate mounted filesystems for the user
> accounts, so they could be spread out physically on several drives? 

Theoretically you could do that (more likely by making, say, 01-50
symlinks to corresponding directories on a filesystem on another drive).
The actual rationale was to keep the $CS_ROOT/home directory from getting
too large, since large directories on most Unix systems slow down file
access. The technique is called directory hashing (I think - the ZMailer
author calls it that, at least), and it's also used for the namedb
(account information database, $CS_ROOT/private/namedb).

This scheme works well for numerical user IDs, but doesn't quite work as
well for custom usernames which could have anything as the last two
characters. $CS_ROOT/home ends up with a lot of nearly-empty hash
directories. But a traditional ISP hashing scheme of /home/u/s/user would
result in the directory /home/a/a having nearly 1000 entries, one for each
of aa001-aa999.

The hashing scheme is implemented in $CS_ROOT/lib/login2dir (and again in
the login2dir function in $CS_ROOT/lib/cs-shlib). Unless it's hardcoded
somewhere else, you could change it to whatever you like in both places,
and all would continue to work.

> Also, it looks like a logged in csuite user will be in the account home
> directory, ...aa001/, for example, instead of using a work subdirectory
> like the old Freeport setup. As far as I can see, users will not have
> access to configuration dot files in their home directories, so this
> arrangement should be OK.

Right. Users can view dotfiles, but not edit them, or upload new ones
using Lynx or FTP, or extract them from compressed files with tar. I'm not
sure the CSuite unzip has the same restriction. I think the worst a most
can do by editing a dotfile is cause a program to run (with the user's
privileges) from their .forward file. So you'll want to keep your system
patched and up to date to prevent anyone who manages to get shell access
from gaining root.

> However, I wonder about issues of incorporating old Freeport style
> accounts into the Csuite structure. Would these be accomodated with their
> old .../bb123/work directory structure, or would they have to be revised?

I'm not familiar with Freeport; are any configuration files stored in the
work subdirectories? If not, you may want to move the contents of
$HOME/work into $HOME, for each user's $HOME, taking care to ignore
dotfiles in $HOME/work.

Michael

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