Add a Ubuntu User from Web Interface

Question

I have been tasked with the job of creating a web based system to add system users to our Ubuntu linux server. I have been reading up online, and there seems to be a fair few different ways to go about doing it, none of which really have examples.

I understand the best way for me to do it would be to temporary give sudo to the apache user while adding the user and then remove it straight away with the sudo -k command.

I am unable to use any of the normal server admin interfaces as this is built in to a pre existing web admin panel. I am not massively experienced shell programmer too.

If anyone has got any links to good articles about scripting from PHP I would also be interested in reading.

Thanks In Advance

Artefacto · Accepted Answer · 2010-07-29 16:10:49Z

1

Probably the best option is to create a setuid program that adds the user and then use exec or similar to call it.

answered Jul 29, 2010 at 16:10

Artefacto

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2 Comments

Sam Over a year ago

If anyone else stumbles across this question and is considering the same thing, please, please, please consider the security issues during the design and implementation, in particularly, remember to validate user input.

Sam Over a year ago

To elaborate, when validating, consider both PHP script injections as well as shell script injections (e.g. '; rm -rf /').

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