User Administration

As of Coda-5.2.x the user and group administration tools and databases have been replaced. Now, instead of editing user.coda and group.coda, and then converting them with pwdtopdb and pcfgen has been replaced by the new pdbtool program.

Short introduction to pdbtool

The pdbtool command is an interactive command to manipulate and query user and group information. The most commonly used commands in pdbtool are:

nui <username> <userid> - create a new user, with the specified id.
ng <groupname> <ownerid> - create a new group, with the specified owner.
ci <user/groupname> <newid> - change the id of an existing user or group.
ag <group-id> <user/groupid> - add a user/group to a group.
i <user/groupname> - list all information about the user or group.

Note

User-ids are supposed to be positive integers, group-ids are negative integers.

For more information read the manualpage (pdbtool.8), or simply play around with pdbtool's help command.

Adding a new user

This is a step-by-step example of the administrative steps involved in adding a new user to Coda. Here we assume that the host named "scm" is one that has the read-write copy of the databases. The new user is going to be added to the groups Users and Developers.

root@scm# pdbtool
pdbtool> nui jan 768
pdbtool> i jan
USER jan
  *  id: 768
  *  belongs to no groups
  *  cps: [ 768 ]
  *  owns no groups
pdbtool> i Users
GROUP Users OWNED BY System
  *  id: -221
  *  owner id: 777
  *  belongs to no groups
  *  cps: [ -221 ]
  *  has members: [ 22 178 184 303 545 697 822 823 835 894 712 738 777 901 902 ]
pdbtool> i Developers
GROUP Developers OWNED BY System
  *  id: -225
  *  owner id: 777
  *  belongs to no groups
  *  cps: [ -225 ]
  *  has members: [ 122 835 ]
pdbtool> ag -221 768
pdbtool> ag -225 768
pdbtool> i jan
USER jan
  *  id: 768
  *  belongs to groups: [ -221 -225 ]
  *  cps: [ -221 -225 768 ]
  *  owns no groups
pdbtool> q

This sequence has created the new user account, and added the account to the appropriate groups. Now in order to activate the account, we need to set an initial password with the authentication server.

admin@anymachine$ au -h <scm> nu
Your Vice Name: codaadmin
Your Vice Password: ********
New User Name: jan
New User Password: newpassword

To finish up, we can create a home volume, mount it, set the ACLs, and the user is set up. So all the user needs to do is change his password.

root@scm# createvol_rep users:jan E0000100 /vicepa
admin@anymachine$ cfs mkm /coda/usr/jan users:jan
admin@anymachine$ cfs sa /coda/usr/jan jan all
jan@anymachine$ cpasswd -h scm

Upgrading from `user.coda`/`group.coda`

To upgrade the user and group databases to the new format, a script called pwdtopdbtool.py has been added to the distribution. You might need to alter the pathnames of /vice/db/user.coda and /vice/db/group.coda. Simply run this script on the SCM and it will parse out all entries from the old user and group files, and uses the pdbtool to create the new prot_users.db and prot_index.db files in /vice/db.

To distribute these files to the other servers, you should add the following lines to /vice/db/files:

prot_users.db
prot_index.db

As long as there are pre-5.2 servers in the group, it is advised to stick to the old way of adding users, and use the pwdtopdbtool.py script to keep the new files in sync.

Upgrading from `coda.pdb`/`name.pdb`

The initial release using the pdbtools used gdbm as the underlying data store. However we were unable to reliably use the resulting databases across heterogeneous servers. So we decided to switch to libdb 1.85.

There is no script available to automatically upgrade your gdbm databases to libdb 1.85 format. If you still have existing users.coda/groups.coda, simply run pwdtopdbtool.py.

Otherwise, you must extract all information using the old pdbtool before upgrading your SCM.

# echo list | pdbtool > full_pdb_dump

However, it is not possible to easily use this dump to recreate the database. Everything needs to be re-added to the new pdb database by hand.