2011-10-26 00:00:00
Recently we upgraded our BoKS master and replica servers. Out went the aged Sun V210 with Solaris 8 and BoKS 6.0.3 and in came shiny new hardware+OS+BoKS. Lovely! Everything was purring along! We did start getting complaints that newly created users couldn't log in to all of their servers, which seemed odd. One of our Unix admins spotted that all these users had their shells set to bash, while ksh is the default shell we should be using.
How come the user default shell had changed all of a sudden? We traced the cause back to the BoKS web interface, but couldn't find out where the new shell setting had come from.
So! Back to grepping through the TCL source code of the web interface! A last ditch attempt, searching for every instance of the word "shell" (excluding the help files of course). In between oodles of lines of code I stumble upon this nugget:
# Get first shell from /etc/shells if it exists,
proc boks_uadm_get_default_shell {} {
if { [catch {set fp [open /etc/shells r]}] == 0 } {
So there you have it! The BoKS v6.5 web interface simply grabs the first line of /etc/shells (if the file exists) and uses that for default value in the "shell" field when creating new user accounts. After changing the first line back to /bin/ksh things were back to normal.
An RFC has been submitted to make the user' default shell a configurable option.
kilala.nl tags: boks, sysadmin,
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