Puppet 2.7 Cookbook

Managing users' SSH access

The only secure server is one that's turned off. Nonetheless, a good approach to access control for servers is to use named user accounts with passphrase-protected SSH keys, rather than having users share an account with a widely-known password. Puppet makes this easy to manage, thanks to the built-in ssh_authorized_key type.

To combine this with virtual users, as described in the previous section, you can create a define, which includes both the user and the ssh_authorized_key. This will also be useful for adding customization files and other per-user resources.

How to do it…

1. Change the user::virtual class that you created in the section on managing users with virtual resources, to the following:

   class user::virtual { define ...