How can I make a Mac OS-style 'guest account' in Ubuntu?

[misterfriendly]

hello -

I'm wishing for something like the Mac OS 'Guest' account in Ubuntu. Basically a full-featured sandbox account (locked down & customized to the admin's requirements) with no password; you can log into it from the main login screen; and the guest has a real home directory with read-write access. Upon logout everything is wiped back to default settings.

(The Ubuntu Guest Session seems kind of useless, because you can only log into it after another user has logged in).

Does anyone have a solution in place, or suggestions?

thanks in advance -

[oxide54]

I would be very interested in this?

any other useful sites on running ubuntu in school?

[linuxgirlie]

I am assuming this is stand-a-lone? We have guest accounts on our clients (ubuntu) but the users are created on the server and the password is changed the and home area wiped at the end of the day/week/month whatever we decide. It does have a password as well, which can be changed to what we want....will this be a stand-a-lone box? Connected to a windows server? Linux server?

[misterfriendly]

I was thinking standalone like the Mac guest account which is local - but server-based is an interesting idea. My main server is Mac OS 10.5 and I have various Ubuntu servers on hand as well. How would you set it up? (Including the home directory auto-wipe).

[linuxgirlie]

Would the users home areas be on the box or on the server? We have a cron job that runs that does this for us, but that job could easily be run on the client so that every night at 5pm the home area is wiped. We just use the 'rm' command - for example: 'rm -d -R -f /home/users/guests/guest1/*" This is then run on a cron job that we setup, we can also disable or enable or change the password of all the guest users at once. Again our lockdown of the system, is done on the box or as the user. When doing it as the user they get the 'profile' downloaded at login. Again this is all done server side.

I suppose if you want to do it client side you could, get a ubuntu box, create your user, lock it down with gconf or similar, setup cron, get it to run the above command at a certain time. Though that does not help you if someone logs into immediately after the last person.