7. User management

7.1 Adding users

Adding a Linux user by usual means and setting a samba password using smbpasswd will work. If you have any doubt, just refer to the SAMBA documentation. This is not a difficult issue.

7.2 Password management

I am issuing this a major topic because I couldn't learn yet how to manage users and users' passwords from a Windows workstation without using a web interface. I couldn't find and didn't know how to build integrated tools to solve this problem. So, I am using a CGI program to get it done.

Try the package at http://changepassword.sourceforge.net, it seems to be a good choice.

7.3 Granting or denying access to users

As you could see in a previous section of this howto, the SAMBA daemon will call a netlogon.sh script every time the tracking share is mounted. This netlogon.sh script will call a script with the user's name giving this script the ip address of the refered workstation as a parameter. This user script will apply the desired rules.

For example if you want to give the user full access to internet:

#!/bin/sh
#
COMMAND=$1
ADDRESS=$2
EXTIF=$3
IPTABLES='/usr/sbin/iptables'
$IPTABLES $COMMAND POSTROUTING -t nat -s $ADDRESS -o $EXTIF -j MASQUERADE

If you don't want to change anything to a particular user, just give him an empty script:

#/bin/sh
#
exit 0

Or just don't create any script for the less privileged users, letting them have the default.sh script, which would be empty as the previous or just give limited access as follows:

#!/bin/sh
#
COMMAND=$1
ADDRESS=$2
EXTIF=$3
EXTIFADDRESS=$4
IPTABLES='/usr/sbin/iptables'
$IPTABLES $COMMAND POSTROUTING -t nat -s $ADDRESS -o $EXTIF --dport 25 -j SNAT --to-source $EXTIFADDRESS
$IPTABLES $COMMAND POSTROUTING -t nat -s $ADDRESS -o $EXTIF --dport 110 -j SNAT --to-source $EXTIFADDRESS

Remember that this script requires you to modify all the previous scripts to include the extra parameter ou just modify the script script. And remember that you will go nowhere whis this howto if you don't understand iptables.