[Gllug] Guest account for Linux??

[Richard Jones]

On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 12:44:32AM +0600, Emon wrote:
> I am running Slackware10.2 with KDE desktop on a home PC. I was 
> wondering how to setup a guest account with limited permissions & stuffs 
> like that.
> 
> Do I have to create a new account with the login name 'guest' & no 
> password??

If you want to get 0wned in a short period of time, expose this guest
account to the internet ...

> I thought there was a especial limited user (by default) called 'nobody' 
> & a especial limited group (by default) called 'nogroup'...... is there 
> any to use them as guest account?? if so how?? especially in KDE??

Don't use 'nobody' -- it's a special account used by some daemons and
is not supposed to have write access to any files.

> OR is there some other way do things??

It depends a lot on how much you trust the user(s) of this guest
account.  If they are trusted, you may as well give them a normal user
account.  If they are untrusted, you're probably better off setting up
a virtual machine for them, and making sure you have a good firewall
between your environment and their VM.  There's plenty of VM software
around - we've recently been using Xen a lot:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
Team Notepad - intranets and extranets for business - http://team-notepad.com
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