What is it?

Newuser is a self-serve account creation program. It will collect information from the user, and use this to create the user's home directory and password file entry. This program has been in more or less continuous use since 1983 on m-net, and since 1991 on grex.

Where is it?

These easiest way to get this is via the web. You will need the source and data archive files.

You can also fetch it on grex, they live in:
~mdw/Public/nu.src.tar.gz and ~mdw/Public/nu.data.tar.gz
Sorry, not available via anonymous ftp this way.

The very latest version, *subject to change without notice*, and not nicely packaged up, can be found in
/afs/umich.edu/user/m/d/mdw/src/grexnu/src/
If you don't have access to a workstation with AFS, you may be able to get at it via http://web.mit.edu/afs/, or via anonymous ftp to citi.umich.edu. If you can't get these to work, don't sweat it; the code is not ready for you. The very latest version contains experimental support for 386bsd style password file logic.

Caveats

  1. Respect the copyright notice.
  2. I distribute this "as-is" with no support.
  3. Danger! This program can compromise your system's security if improperly installed. Proper installation is *Very* system specific, and requires the expert services of somebody very familiar with Unix security, as well as the in's & out's of your system and its particular software setup.
  4. the "shadow" password file support is extremely specific to grex. Shadow code support is particularly prone to being machine specific.
  5. the supplemental support/configuration files may be out of date, and only reflect an early grex setup.
  6. As found here, this code only supports SunOS 4.1.
  7. there is no documentation other than the source you see.
  8. don't even think of installing this if you can't describe every step of the password file locking algorithm used by "passwd" and "chsh" on your system, and can also describe and justify the companion error recovery strategies in use including the possibility of a machine crash or running out of filespace at any point in the algorithm. It is highly probable you will need to replace the locking logic in newuser with custom logic compatible with your system's locking and error recovery logic.
  9. If you wish to report a problem, you should send it to me, at mdw@umich.edu (or mdw@cyberspace.org), not to grex staff. I cannot guarantee either a swift or useful response.
Basically, you shouldn't even expect this code to compile on your machine without work. If you are an expert programmer, familiar with Unix, you should be able to get this to work without too much trouble. If you are familiar with Unix security, you may also be able to install this in a manner that does not compromise your system security (although you may have to install custom copies of login, su, ftpd, or other utilities). If you are not and do not have access to such a person, you should consider this source to be poisonous green glowing biohazardous nuclear grade reactor slag, and treat it with at least as much respect and caution.

Notwithstanding all this, if you manage to port it to a new and interesting machine, I would certainly appreciate it if you could send me a list of diffs.

The grex shadow logic is based on the JFH shadow code. A recent version of this is in
ftp://gumby.dsd.trw.com/pub/security/shadow-3.2.2.tar.Z
What grex currently runs is not exactly the same as this. There is also a copy of the 386bsd shadow logic here, in
ftp://gumby.dsd.trw.com/pub/networking/shadow.shar.Z

Contact Information

mdw + /afs/umich.edu/user/m/d/mdw + mdw@umich.edu