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Introduction

It's often useful to be able to share accounts between a number of users. For example, a group maintaining an externally visible service need to be able to start and kill the server process. Giving such a shared account a password is a fairly bad plan: such passwords tend not to get changed very often, and they have a habit of spreading beyond the group of legitimate users.

The Become program presented here offers a solution to the problems of shared accounts. It allows the system administrator to define which users are allowed access to which accounts, on which hosts, and to execute which commands. Such shared accounts can then, in general, have their passwords removed.

This coincidentally has another advantage: when `becoming' to a shared account, a user can retain her(1) own environment, which she's carefully crafted and honed over the years, rather then being presented with some lowest-common-denominator setup which probably doesn't even use the right shell.

The configuration file for Become can either be distributed to all the various hosts in a network or a few carefully set up and secure servers (see section Installation types).


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This document was generated by Mark Wooding on March, 14 2006 using texi2html 1.76.