Instructions for BEN Help

September 2002

by Chris Mulligan

This document should help those of you new to BEN help get a grasp of what we try and do for our users. Remember we want people to be pleased and continue to use BEN, so always be polite and friendly. If you don't know the answer, cheat them through the line to another person who might know, or if no one there knows ask them to come back/email benhelp@mbhs.edu. Text following a $> is to be typed into a binx prompt, changing the {bracketed} text to whatever is appropriate.

When someone (anyone, teacher, student, parent) comes up to BEN help, ask how you can help them. We'll probably get a lot less random stuff like lost freshman now that we're inside the media center, but be nice even if they're not looking for us specifically. If they would like BEN help, ask them to show you their ID. No ID, no service, period. This also saves you from asking them for their student ID # or spelling of difficult names. If they just say they have a problem logging in, ask them to do it for you, right now. You'll often find they're trying to put a 0x before the log in, like for novell. Don't make them feel dumb, just correct their mistake.

Looking up users

For looking up a user, all that data is contained in the file /etc/passwd. You can find just the lines (each user is on a individual line) by using the very powerful tool grep. You can grep(search) for any part of the student's first name, last name, year (03, 04, 05, 06) or I guess even middle initial.

$> grep -i {search criteria} /etc/passwd

If you get way too much info you can connect several greps together.

$> grep -i {search criteria} /etc/passwd | grep -i {additional search}

User Passwords

No, we can't look up passwords. We can however do something even better, change them. Everyone with a binx account can change their own password, but only root, the master administration account, can change other users' passwords. However if you're a BEN help staffer and have been given sudo permission this allows you also to change other people's passwords. When you first run sudo after logging in, it will prompt you for simply “Password” this is your password, not the user's. This is to make sure someone else doesn't grab hold of the power of sudo. After you type your password it asks for a “New UNIX password,” this is the new password for the user, flip the keyboard around and have them type it twice. These passwords can be anything they'll remember, preferably over 5 characters, not a word, not their ID number, etc. In Linux passwords don't show up as you type them, don't be alarmed.

$> sudo spasswd {chmullig}

Password:

Changing password for user chmullig

New UNIX password:

Retype new UNIX password:

passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully

Adding accounts

To add accounts you have to run another sudo command, sudo benadduser. You then enter all the information into one command and it creates the account.

$> sudo benadduser {user name} {first name} {middle initial} {last name} {year (02, 03, etc or staff)} {student ID #}

The schema for new user names is firstname, firstname, up to 6 characters of lastname. If that is already taken, try firstname, firstname, middle initial, up to 5 characters of lastname. IE, “Chris Mulligan” becomes “chmullig”.

Before you create an account, make sure that username doesn't exist already. Just like for searching for someone's account, do a grep -i {new account name} /etc/passwd to be sure.

Scripts

Yes, these commands are hard. No, there is no undo. How do you remember what to type in? You don't have to! Chris wrote interactive scripts that prompt you for information, then execute the commands properly for you! The scripts are located in ~chmullig/bin/ and are called add.sh and search.sh. Add.sh interactively prompts for the various info required to create a BEN account, while search.sh is the grep command, but saves you from typing /etc/passwd.

You can either run ~chmullig/bin/{add.sh/search.sh} each time you want to execute the or create references to the commands in your shell. You do this by adding some info to your tcsh config file. Below is the command to install the aliases.

$> cp ~chmullig/.tcshrc ./

After you've intstalled that file, you need to log out and re-log in. Then you can run search and add as though they were any other command.

Aliasing

Anatoly wrote a nifty program to link courses directly in BEN. Open up BEN and search for the teacher. When you're on their info page, you should see something that says “Link {Christopher W Lloyd}'s classes (sysop-only)”open that up and put the classes into groups as appropriate. The group numbers don't matter.

Etc

A few other things to remember, when you step away from your terminal, lock it. vlock is a nifty program which will lock your terminal until you come back and type in your password. If you have any problems, just tap one of the more experienced member's on the shoulder and we'll be glad to help you. We'd rather be bothered then have to undo something you did wrong. Once you've done something for someone, have them try to log in.