Subject: Restriction question

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 16:06:47 +0100 (MET)

Hello,

I'm new in this list. I checked the archive but did not find answer to my
question. Please, help me if somebody can.

The situation.
Our server (SUN with Solaris8) has approx. 15.000 student accounts. They
may log in (quite) everywhere from the internet, and (among others) they
can use PINE. In general, we do not want to introduce very strict
limitations.

But in our building there is a room where there are some terminals for
(quite) free use. There were some very sad experience in usage of these
terminals, so we decided that logging in from that terminals we DO
RESTRICT our system to use PINE only.
We solved this with modifying the login shell script (/etc/profile since
everyone uses bash shell) that if the user comes from that terminals,
he/she can use only PINE (exec pine is in the script in that case).

Of course, we have to limit to use different options (eg. reaching
subshell, suspending pine, etc) to prevent to get a "full" shell prompt.

This limitations cannot written in the pine.conf.fixed since "in general"
we do not want such limitations. So we decided that in this /etc/profile
script we'll use the command line parameters to set these limitations.

After it we realized that the command line parameters can be overwritten
by the user if his .pinerc file is writable, we made a workaround on this
problem.

NOW we still have a problem with the configuration parameters. Although
we have the following start line (I wrapped the line only for this mail,
all is in one line of course):

pine -feature-list="no-enable-msg-view-addresses,
no-enable-msg-view-web-hostnames, no-use-subshell-for-suspend,
no-enable-alternate-editor-cmd, no-enable-alternate-editor-implicitly,
no-enable-unix-pipe-cmd, no-enable-msg-view-urls, no-enable-suspend,
no-print-offers-custom-cmd-prompt" -editor=/bin/false
-url-viewers=/bin/false -speller=/bin/false -display-filters=''
-sending-filters='' -download-command=/bin/false
-upload-command=/bin/false -image-viewer=/bin/false -ssh-open-timeout=0
-rsh-open-timeout=0

The users STILL CAN GET full shell with the following procedure:

1. From the main menu choose "Help"
2. Search the URL that points to the home web page of the PINE
3. press RETURN to go to this url (this url is highlighted, it means that
it is selectable)
4. in this case Pine asks for the Url-viewer program
5. the user type "/usr/local/bin/bash"
6. He is ready, he's got a SHELL........... :(((((

So, my question:
Is it any possibility to make that address NOT CHOOSABLE, or disable the
entire Help menupoint in the main menu?

Or, perhaps any other tip, how to prevent this possible action?

Thanks in advance

Peter Halasz
system administrator
Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Student Computer Centre
Hungary

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