Creating users "on - the - fly"

Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2015-02-06T17:52:46Z

On Fri 2015-02-06 12:41:38 -0500, Cary FitzHugh wrote:
> The trouble is that the user isn't created on the machine beforehand.
> But I actually don't want the user created, b/c I don't want to
litter
> all these servers with little user directories.    Users may be
> transient as well - so littering the directories of these machines
> with tons of data just causes many other problems (running out of
> inodes, disk-space, etc).

If this is your only concern, most systems don't require that a user
have a unique home directory at all.  You could create a /home/nobody
which is unusable by anyone, and populate the systems's user table with
users (maybe via some sensible nameservice switch module) pointing at
that directory as their homedir.

In other words, i don't think this is an ssh problem, it can be solved
directly in other parts of your OS.

         --dkg