On an audited production system it is very important to know who switched to which system or shared account. Therefore it is prudent to restrict direct logins for all system and shared account where more than one individual knows the password. All users should do a direct login using their own account and then switch to the system or shared account.
However, there are situations where you have to allow direct logins for system or shared accounts. For example, within an Oracle RAC cluster you have to enable direct ssh logins for oracle. But in such an environment you have to protect the whole cluster as a single entity against incoming ssh connection, i.e. direct oracle logins should not work if you come from a node that is not part of the cluster. In the following example I will show how to achieve this goal as well.
Usually all system and shared accounts have one thing in common, that is they are not in the "users" group. The following example assumes that all individual user accounts are in the "users" group but system and shared accounts like root and oracle are not. If you want to go a step further, a good solution would be to implement a new 'logingroup' users group which would require users to be given explicit access.
In this example I will show how to restrict direct logins for:
- SSH (/etc/pam.d/sshd)
- Console Login (/etc/pam.d/login)
- Graphical Gnome Login (/etc/pam.d/gdm
- or for all logins (/etc/pam.d/system-auth)
