Savannah New Administrator Intern Account

The Savannah svadm account is the first step in onboarding a new Savannah Hacker administrator. Most of the current admins all started with an svadm account. This is a read-only account (for the most part) and therefore safe for exploring the systems. That's systems plural. There are several in the infrastructure. This is a good place to start to get an understanding of where things are and how things work.

Setup Instructions For Savannah Hackers

Ensure that the user has created an account on the Savannah web UI to hold the cannonical account name, email, ssh key, gpg key, in the database. All of these are required at various times.

Create a normal non-root user account for the new user on the mgt management node. Create it with a disabled password.

adduser --disabled-password $NEWUSER

Extract their ssh key from the database and install it into their ssh authorized_keys file. (The authorized_keys on mgt should be getting created automatically via having a zero sized file template in /etc/skel/.ssh/authorized_keys file. This creates the file as the user and keeps the permissions correct.)

...verify that it looks reasonable...
sv_get_authorized_keys $NEWUSER
...add it to their authorized_keys file...
sv_get_authorized_keys $NEWUSER >> ~$NEWUSER/.ssh/authorized_keys

Add the user to the adm and svadm groups.

adduser $NEWUSER adm
adduser $NEWUSER svadm

Done. This user can now ssh into the mgt node as their own non-root user account. They can then change user to the svadm user account.

Instructions for the new Savannah Administrator Intern

Log into your account on the mgt management node.

ssh $USER@mgt.savannah.gnu.org  # or $USER@mgt.sv.gnu.org

Use sudo to switch users to the svadm account.

sudo -i -u svadm

You are now enabled to browse around. You can list processes. You can browse log files. You can look at crontables. You can look at configuration. You can look at scripts and source. The account is mostly read-only to be a safe account for new people to explore without danger of breaking anything.