California State University San Bernardino
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Senior Project Presentation

Date June 12, 2009 Time 11:00 AM Place JB 359

Title Computer Science Lab Secure Automated Account Creation System for Linux and Windows Workstations

Presenter Aaron Smith

Advisor Dr. George Georgiou

Abstract

The Computer Science Lab Automated Account Creation System is a project 
designed to demonstrate the possibility of automating new account creation
for the Computer Science Lab computers in Jack Brown Hall. The goal of this
project is to install and configure a CentOS Linux server to use OpenLDAP 
and Samba as secure authentication methods for a client system to login to.
The clients of the server system in this case are both Linux and Windows 
systems, where the user accounts are those of students (both undergraduate
and graduate) who are either majoring in Computer Science and Engineering,
or who are registered for a course or courses that require use of the lab 
computers. User accounts created on LDAP/Samba server may be to log into 
both the Windows and Linux laboratory computers in the CSUSB Computer 
Science and Engineering Department.    User account creation is 
accomplished by the use of a perl script, which converts an excel-format 
spreadsheet document into plain text, and then parses the data, extracts 
user information relevant to query the main CSUSB Campus LDAP server, and 
populate the Computer Science Laboratory LDAP server with user account 
information.  This same information is used to create matching Samba 
accounts for users, which allows authentication to both linux and Windows 
XP workstations.  All elements of the account creation and authentication 
processes are secure using SSL as an encryption protocol.  Linux 
workstation home directories are shared via NFS, and the same NFS export 
directories are shared among the Windows XP workstations using Samba as a 
Primary Domain Controller as well as a remote directory sharing service.