I am trying to give my users a simple way for them to change their system account passwords without logging in via command line.

What I'd like is a very simple web UI that lets them log in with username and password, reset their password, and save it back into /etc/shadow.

I've been searching for something like this for a few hours, but figured I'd just ask the experts here.

Thanks

Mike

Here is an article about open source web hosting panels. The top choices can change system passwords.

http://www.gnutomorrow.com/best-free...l-alternative/

I guess someone could make a webpage to do that without too much fuss.

What distro do you have and are the people locally logged in to the local system? (redundant)

Most of what we are using is rhel/centos 6. We also have some Ubuntu 14.04 servers as well.

Yeah I've looked at a lot of these interfaces. However, most are for website hosting administration and password changes are usually specifically for this admin interface, not the actual system accounts.

As jefro says, you could probably write a simple web interface for that easily enough. I am not aware of one that already exists.

But you would want to be careful how you implement that, and how users would access it, because it would be a non-priv'd web server process that also needs to run as a system user or root at least in part, to be able to make those changes. That is always a big potential security issue.

You would also want to make it use a secure connection only (SSL/TLS) to prevent user passwords from being exposed to man in the middle attacks, etc...

Offhand, it seems to me to be a fairly major headache/exposure security-wise, for a very small convenience for login users when you could simply have them use the passwd command when logged in. It would seem like a non-issue for most non-login users. Of course, your requirements are your own.

The article has two cpanels labeled "top choice": VestaCP and Webmin. Coincidentally, they are at the top of the article. As I wrote before, they both do system accounts.