FAUS 1.4.4

FAUS is a Perl CGI to permit user administration through a Web interface.
Samba already has a good web interface for administration known as SWAT. The problem with SWAT is that you can add user just to Samba system, not in the Unix user database (/etc/passwd). To use SWAT you have to type root password to get access for its features, but SWAT itself does not provides any mean of encryptation to protect the password against sniffers.
You can use others tools to provide such encryptation as SSH or SSL, but the process is not flexyble or easy to setup.
FAUS does not require user root to perform any task in user database: it will use the SUDO program to give the correct rights to the user the webserver is running to (for Apache, it is normally "apache" or "nobody"). FAUS will call thought Perl scripts to call the shell commands "useradd", "userdel" and "smbpasswd".
These scripts will check for bad user entry and make sure that only the options that are really necessary to FAUS facilities will be used. For example, is not possible to add a user with a valid shell using FAUS. All users added by it´s interface will have a "/dev/false" as a shell. So on, sudoers file will give root privileges for webserver user to run these Perl scripts.
FAUS is shipped with the Perl CGI, the Perl scripts and a sample of sudoers file (named as sudoers.example) to show a good example of how to setup a sudoers file to have FAUS working.
Main features:
- FAUS will manage users both to UNIX and Samba system if just one command;
- FAUS does not uses root or a suid program to perform operations into /etc/passwd or smbpasswd files: FAUS will use Sudo to give the rights to the Apache user to run some scripts as root. These scripts have limited actions, and will not allow operations that could compromisse the system;
- Its possible to use different forms of authentication when using Apache, since the webserver has several authentication modules, and is allways possible to run the connection with SSL;
- Multilanguage support: all messages, log information can be costumized with a simples text fiel containing HTML code. FAUS supports, right now, English and Portuguese languages;
- Log support: all operations are logged in /var/log/httpd/errors.log (or another location) in the same way as other Apache messages;