multiple users sharing same /home ?
 

Hi! have a question may be sounds strange but really need this!
Need to let different users share same data and contents on a pc.
I don't mean permissions to write,read,execute on other's /home
They have to share same space,settings,mail,etc.etc
Is there a way to get this?
thank a lot for help
Ciao
Emanuele

Easy, just create one user called Guest with a password like Guest or something like that and tell everybody about it.
But you might want instead to create many users, and have a /data partition automatically mounted with open permission for all those users and instead of having them save the data to there /home/user tell them to write to that /data partition.

Sounds nasty.

Why not go the whole way: just make one account and let them all use it?

Any chance you could describe the actual problem that you are trying to address? They is sure to be a better approach.

Evo2.

Hi,

I totally agree with evo2.

Keep your actual users separated from each other and create a dedicated user for the specific environment(s).

Ie: if some/all users need to do work on say the database environment create a database user and let the normal users enter that account. You can give them the full login credentials or add them to sudo.

Hope this helps.

We have in Italy this strange law regarding tracking and privacy..
Any operator working on the same pc needs own credentials to log in
At the same time I want everybody using and working on the same thunderbird account and same desktop

I know that for windows systems, have created a script using screensaver function to login and logout without changing enviroment

I was wondering if something similar would be available under linux such like switching user keeping same desktop and enviroment
Thanks

If your only requirement is to have different credentials, you can create a thousand users with the same home directory.

But expect some fuzz... some programs might record these credentials and get confused when run with a different $USER name.

How about everyone having their own account, but their .xsession file just does an su to the shared user before firing up the window manager/desktop environment. Might take some lower level tweaking, but it should possible.

Evo2.

Hi,

Before you start creating users with the same homedir do have a good look at the Italian law concerning tracking and privacy.

I doubt it (i'm not italian and don't know that specific law) if having their own credentials (as in own name and password only) is enough to comply. This would _not_ record action of a specific individual user, which might be needed.

Just a heads up.

I just had a look at the config file for my display manager (I use slim) and there is a setting for the login command. It is set to:

I wonder if you could change it to something like:

Where you have setup sudo to allow the specific users to run /usr/local/bin/su_generic without entering a password.
/usr/local/bin/su_generic would be a script containing something like.
Where "generic" is the user that everyone will be using. I think this should probably satisfy the legal requirements since the su call is logged: so you can see which individual user is logged in as the generic user. The reason for using the script instead of a direct "sudo su" is simply because you don't want to give passwordless access to the "su" command for your users.

Evo2.