Recently I've started getting more and more into automating tasks I do at work. Part of this is relates around some ideas I've had about shell use and ssh key generation, distribution, and keyhost networks.
I also recently started doing administration work for a free shell box service (metawire.org) and we need a nice way to distribute user accounts across some new machines we're getting in the next week or so.
So to implement the above, I need some way to easily manipulate user and group accounts on various flavors of UNIX. "Well," says I, I says, "I'll just check out CPAN. Surely, it being CPAN, which is for Perl, there will be many modules already written to deal with this stuff, since it much be such a common requirement."
My searching skills are either woefully pathetic, or there just isn't a nice generic module for dealing with user administration.
So I think, "Well, that's ok, I'll just start a nice generic module, write the OS-specific stuff I need, and other people can add stuff. Shouldn't be too hard."
So I look around some more, and discover and mdxi refers to as "one of the most spectacular abuses of CPAN and it's top-level namespace ever."
What the shizzy, yo:
http://search.cpan.org/user/tbone/User-1.6/User.pm
That is 16 lines of code. I'm still pretty pissed about this.
So I suppose I'll just use "User::Accounts" or something along those lines. But really. What the hell?
rjbs pointed this out to me:
http://search.cpan.org/user/vidul/Linux-usermod-0.3/usermod.pm
Seems okay for what it does, but not what I need, really.
So, whinging aside: Am I totally missing something incredibly obvious? It astounds me that there isn't a generic user admin package written, so I'm pretty sure I must just be being completely blind here.
Not sure what else...
phillup on 2004-04-28T04:59:38
I'm not sure what else you have in mind... but, I'd probably start with this:
http://search.cpan.org/user/drolsky/Net-SSH-Perl-1.25/lib/Net/SSH/Perl.pm
And try real hard to simply use the commands already available on each platform to do the rest.
Re:Solaris
djberg96 on 2004-04-28T14:44:44
My searching skills are either woefully pathetic, or there just isn't a nice generic module for dealing with user administration.As a related followup to my own message....
That's because there isn't a nice, generic API for *nix systems when it comes to adding, configuring and deleting users and groups. It's a PITA.
Doable, though.
Re:Solaris
bda on 2004-04-29T02:24:38
I'm not a big fan of NIS[+] so I probably won't ever write that.:)
But I've gotten so far as to hack Unix::PasswdFile into Unix::ShadowFile. Unix::MasterPasswdFile (BSD) should be finished by tomorrow, and I can start working on the User::Account or Admin::User modules. Namespace issues need to be resolved, definitely.:)
Pretty simple stuff, but neat.
Eventually the goal is to use something like Stem for inter-system messaging to pass out the files, etc.Re:Solaris
djberg96 on 2004-04-29T03:17:49
That's cool - I noticed the lack of shadow file handling in Unix::PasswdFile, so I was a little scared off and tempted to just use the Solaris specific one.
