Create a new user on Agaric's test server at MayFirst/PeopleLink

Creating a public key

The user to be added (we'll call him Andrew) types this in his terminal:

ssh-keygen

Then he sends his public key to the person acting as sysadmin at the moment. As an e-mail attachment is fine. For users not used to the command line it can be hard to find the public key in a hidden .ssh folder, but it is possible to use scp to put it on a server both the user and the acting sysadmin have access to.

Adding the user to the server

The sysadmin then logs into the test server and uses standard Debian commands:

ssh simone.mayfirst.org
sudo adduser andrew

Respond to the prompts and put in the password and other information it wants.

sudo adduser andrew staff
sudo mkdir /home/andrew/.ssh
cd /home/andrew/.ssh/
sudo vi authorized_keys

Paste in the user's public key, and save and exit Vim (esc :x).

sudo chown -R andrew:andrew /home/andrew/.ssh/

Alternatively, if you've already pushed the key to the server, you can cat instead of paste. (You cannot use "cat id_rsa.pub >> .ssh/authorized_keys" with sudo, when you need to be acting as root on the adding side.)

sudo cat id_rsa.pub | sudo tee /home/andrew/.ssh/authorized_keys

No longer needed. After uploading a public key for the user, on MayFirst, you need to run manually monkeysphere-authentication update-users (untested, from https://support.mayfirst.org/ticket/3041 ). (2010 Oct. - Currently this command is not being found, on the test server at least.)

If you get, on git push, the server returning "insufficient permission for adding an object to repository database" make sure you did not miss this line:

sudo adduser andrew staff
Adding user andrew' to groupstaff' ...
Adding user andrew to group staff