One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to change the password on the first login attempt.
I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account. The account and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.
A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these settings in /etc/shadow:
root@tjener:~# chage -l test Last password change : May 02, 2010 Password expires : never Password inactive : never Account expires : never Minimum number of days between password change : 0 Maximum number of days between password change : 99999 Number of days of warning before password expires : 7 root@tjener:~#
The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired account, is to change the date of the last password change to the lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age to the difference in days between that date and today. To make it simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).
After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as intended:
root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test root@tjener:~# chage -l test Last password change : Jan 02, 1970 Password expires : never Password inactive : never Account expires : never Minimum number of days between password change : 0 Maximum number of days between password change : 10950 Number of days of warning before password expires : 7 root@tjener:~#
So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).
Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make sure only the user itself have the account password?
If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed on the first login. This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so I did not notice this in my initial testing. I have tested it on Squeeze, and 'chage -d 0 username' do work there. I have not tested it on Lenny yet.
Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an equivalent command to expire a password is 'passwd -e username', which insert zero into the date of the last password change.