launchpadblog

Glyph posted an interesting script to the launchpad-users mailing list that I thought was definitely worth sharing:

Quite often, I’ve discovered that I want to add someone (who already has an account on launchpad) to my system so they can log in and attach to my ‘screen’ session; however, I will inevitably screw up typing in the finger information, setting permissions on their .ssh directory, assigning them a bogus password, etc. Here’s a simple Python script that will add a user to your system with the same username as on Launchpad, and with their SSH keys already set up so they can log in, but no system password.

You can download the script from http://people.ubuntu.com/~kiko/launchpadduser.py.

It requires adduser, wget and python. You’re expected to run this as root, so the usual warnings apply, but it’s simple enough for you to audit on your own. And there is no error handling! A usage example:

root@beetle:~# python launchpadduser.py kiko
Adding user `kiko' ...
Adding new user `kiko' (1012) with group `users' ...
Creating home directory `/home/kiko' ...
Copying files from `/etc/skel' ...
--09:43:36--  https://launchpad.net/~kiko/+sshkeys
           => `/home/kiko/.ssh/authorized_keys'
Resolving launchpad.net... 91.189.90.211
Connecting to launchpad.net|91.189.90.211|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 Ok
Length: 860 [text/plain]

100%[=============================================>] 860           --.--K/s             

09:43:38 (9.49 MB/s) - `/home/kiko/.ssh/authorized_keys' saved [860/860]

And presto:

kiko@anthem:~$ ssh beetle
Linux beetle 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Tue Feb 12 07:42:25 UTC 2008 i686
kiko@beetle:~$ 

This entry was posted by kiko on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 1:54 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.