How to remotely lock out users from logging in temporarily

Question

I'm not sure how to word this. I would like to be able to, remotely, lock down my kids' access either for an amount of time, or have lock/unlock control. Basically, I want to lock out an account temporarily until I unlock it remotely.

Answer 1

A quick-and-dirty solution would be:

• ssh into the box
• change the password of the user your kids log in with ("sudo passwd kiddies")
• issue "sudo poweroff"
• tell them to finish their homework before they can use the machine again.

There may be better ways to disable a user account without changing the password, such as

sudo usermod --expiredate 1 kiddies

or

sudo passwd -l kiddies

and to unlock:

sudo passwd -u kiddies

Answer 2

Not sure about doing it remotely, but you could just change the password and change it back when they are allowed to have access again. You could try LogMeIn or Teamviewer.

Answer 3

You could do it with a root cron job that creates and deletes /etc/nologin

See "man login" for information. It prevents non-root logins.

Of course, when you create /etc/nologin you'll still have to deal with the logged-in users.