Vstfpd and many accounts creation: is there a howto?

Question

I've been googling around and didn't find valuable answer.

I have 98 students. I want to create, for each student a directory where they can upload their own files.

Unless I'm wrong, it seems I'll have to:

• create a student account
• change its password to a strong one
• do this again 98 times!

I would like:

1 - to avoid if possible creating accounts i.e. just configuring vsftp properly and avoid useradd (= avoid the step # 6 of this tutorial)

2 - find a way to change all those students passwords to strong ones, (and of course be able to print them to mail them individually).

Answer 1

This is a template to get the ball rolling. It's a perl script that prints out commands so it will not do anything until you decide to hilight the commands and cut/paste it back into the console.

It does the hard work of generating to user accounts, sets passwords and optionally create or not create a homedirectory. The trick is when creating passwords for the adduser command it needs to be in crypt3 format. So if you run this script...

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;         

my $SALT="jhgk^djfh*gkdh(jghkdhj786876erg98rhj44";
my $user="student";
my $pass="password";
my $encrypted;
my $studno=1;
my $studentstogenerate=20;

for ($studno;$studno<$studentstogenerate;$studno++) {
 $pass='p'.int(rand(100000000000000));
 $encrypted=crypt($pass, $SALT); 
 print "sudo useradd -p '$encrypted'  $user$studno --no-create-home -G ftpgroup # actual pass ($pass)\n";
}

It will generate...

sudo useradd -p 'jhVU3sDajDruY'  student1 --no-create-home -G ftpgroup # actual pass (p67228866189634)
sudo useradd -p 'jhViMGmmQ7d4.'  student2 --no-create-home -G ftpgroup # actual pass (p20494616343373)
sudo useradd -p 'jhMr3VKBG2.ow'  student3 --no-create-home -G ftpgroup # actual pass (p13933001113231)
sudo useradd -p 'jhqPnvxZCcQTg'  student4 --no-create-home -G ftpgroup # actual pass (p45579091049416)
sudo useradd -p 'jhWqVroWUraWk'  student5 --no-create-home -G ftpgroup # actual pass (p35233656259977)
sudo useradd -p 'jhlWOWyt0AKYE'  student6 --no-create-home -G ftpgroup # actual pass (p39944882363487)
sudo useradd -p 'jhJd1AVEU/FE6'  student7 --no-create-home -G ftpgroup # actual pass (p71192849790380)
sudo useradd -p 'jh1I6aDAkq3iA'  student8 --no-create-home -G ftpgroup # actual pass (p41868457411791)

As it uses a random number generator everytime you run it the password will be different.

So in this case student1 has a password of p67228866189634

You can play with this script to generate different output by chnaging the variables. Should be easy enough even if you don't program in perl.

Note: I have added the students to ftpgoup which you might need to change based on the group you used.