Providing geek access to our servers

These are instructions for providing a new geek with full access to our server(s).

Software

On access from Windows, try these:

• Putty: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ - provides shell prompt
• WinSCP: http://winscp.net/eng/index.php - provides file access

Create access key

Use puttygen to create public and private keys:

SSH-2 RSA, 2048 bits

save the public and private keys - ?no need for a passphrase on the private key

Add user

An existing geek needs to login and sudu su to root:

Add a user:

adduser <user>

giving an initial password

Give them su permissions

usermod -G sudo -a <user>

-G says add to your list of supplemental groups (as opposed to your primary group)

-a says append, not replace the list of supplemental groups

Login

The new geek will need to log in using putty and the password then change their password so it's secret.

Set SSH Key

Set SSH keys
cd /home/<user>/.ssh (mkdir if need be, making user correct if uploaded)
create authorized_keys
in that file you put the public half of any SSH keys you want to use for password-less logging in
you'll want to "chmod 700 .ssh"
and "chmod 600 authorized_keys" (read/write only by user) that keeps SSH happier.
You only put the public half on servers you are logging into. The private file always stays with you, so you can use the key pair (pvt/pub) to login to as many servers as you care to setup.