Information for tutors¶
How to create user accounts¶
Log in to the server. On a Mac or Linux open a terminal and use:
ssh username@jspsychlearning.ppls.ed.ac.uk
On Windows you can use PuTTY: https://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/latest/w64/putty.exe Once you’ve logged in successfully you will see a command line prompt e.g. mine is:
[atullo2@jspsychlearning ~]$
Type the following:
sudo newuser_autopass.sh username
where “username” is the UUN of the person to add. The password uses English words to make it a bit easier to remember & type. The word list has been filtered to take out problematic words, but if you don’t like what has been generated, you can run the above again and it will choose a different random password.
How to unban IP addresses¶
If someone fails to log in five times in a row, their IP address will be banned. First log in as above (“how to create user accounts”). Now run the command:
sudo fail2ban-client status sshd
This will list all the currently banned IPs. If there’s only one, or you know which one is the blocked user, run:
sudo fail2ban-client unban 12.34.56.78
replacing the example above with the real IP address. As a last resort, you can also run:
sudo fail2ban-client unban --all
This will unban all IP addresses and your user should be able to reconnect. If a user has problems logging in, it might also be worth checking that the user is using the correct username (just their UUN, not UUN@ed.ac.uk). You could also reset their password.
How to reset user passwords¶
You can safely re-run the user creation process for an existing user, it won’t delete any of their files etc., you’ll see a message “user …. already exists”. It will then reset their password to a new random one, which you can pass on to them.
