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We have a hosted site with a directory that is password protected.

I need to have a user who knows very little about computers, maintain the users that have access to this directory. The list is going to get big, according to our customer database.

My question is 2 fold:

  1. Is there a simple gui program that I can have this user utilize to be able to maintain the users without having to teach them how to use ssh and UNIX?

  2. Am I going about this the right way? Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks for your help!

ErocM
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1 Answers1

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I think any general-purpose GUI you give them is going to involve just as much (if not more) learning about Unix permissions than

Double-click this putty icon, then when you see the user@host:~$ prompt, type allow-user-to-access-stuff <username>

(where allow-user-to-access-stuff is a small script you would write).

If anything involving a fixed-width font is just far too much for your non-technical user to contemplate, then the option I'd go to is a small Sinatra app that does the same thing, just in a browser window. It'd probably be less than a hundred lines of code to produce something that could CRUD a user list that had access permissions, and that did the necessary chmod/setfacl`-fu. I would worry, though, that anyone not able to follow instructions well enough to type a command into putty is probably going to make a right hash of a web interface, too.

womble
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