How to secure svn+ssh checkout users?

Posted by vvanscherpenseel on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by vvanscherpenseel
Published on 2011-11-16T15:59:12Z Indexed on 2011/11/28 10:02 UTC
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Filed under:

security

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ssh

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svn

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shell

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unix-shell

All our SVN repositories are hosted on a dedicated machine on which all the developers have access. Every now and then we need to checkout a repository on a machine we don't own or operate ourselves. Currently we all use our own system (SSH) account for this, but instead I would like to use some generic 'checkoutsvn' user that can be used for this. This user is only used for checking out from a repository, but should not be allowed to log in to the system (no shell access). I tried to do this by setting the default shell of that account to /sbin/nologin but then SVN fails, as apparently svn+ssh requires shell access.

How do you do this? Is there a good solution for this?

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