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Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
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  PROCEDURES FOR SECURING SYSTEMS  
Installing the DOE Login Banner  

Windows/Macintosh
Web Servers    
UNIX   
Important LBNL URLs

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To ensure that users are aware of the Laboratory's Authorized Computer Use policy and to comply with a DOE mandate, a banner will appear each time a user accesses any Laboratory computer system. This banner may be displayed automatically by the system when a user accesses the computer or an adhesive banner may be attached directly to computer monitors.

Laboratory policy regarding the banner (including the full required text) can be found at: http://www.lbl.gov/Workplace/RPM/R9.01.html#RTFToC8

Banner Stickers for your computer may be obtained from TEID in person by going to Building 46, Room 139, by contacting TEID's Administrator at 510 486-6765, or by emailing your request to TEID@lbl.gov.

Instructions for implementing the required warning banners on various types of systems can be found below.

Windows/Macintosh

Download Patch and Installation Instructions for computer security notice from http://www.lbl.gov/download.  There are three download locations on the page: one for WinNT; another for Win 95 or 98; and  the third for the Macintosh. Uncompress the file and read the readme file for instructions. After installation the required warning banner will be displayed whenever the system starts.  

Web Servers

For web servers we are required to place a link labeled "Notice to Users" on each page served. The link can be in the header, in the footer or anywhere on the page. The link should be to the following site, which displays a copy of the required notice:

http://www.lbl.gov/ITSD/Security/policies/user-notice.htm

UNIX

The banners for Unix machines depend on the particular vendor and service. For many recent systems (Sun, Linux), creating the file /etc/issue containing the banner text causes the banner text to be displayed before the console login and before all interactive logins such as telnet, rsh, and rlogin.

Linux systems use two such files, /etc/issue for console logins and /etc/issue.net for telnet logins, so be sure to place the banner text in both.  For other systems and for services that do not respond to the /etc/issue file, put the banner text in the file /etc/motd.

The contents of this file are displayed by the global /etc/.login and the /etc/profile files, depending on which shell you start (sh or csh), immediately after a successful login. Displaying the /etc/motd file immediately after login is also an option for the Secure Shell daemon (sshd) and is set in the /usr/local/etc/sshd_config file. 

Some versions of the FTP service have been modified to display after login the contents of the file .login_message found in the root directory of the FTP tree or in the users home directory. You will have to try this to see if it works. If it does not work, you must put a file named NOTICE_TO_USERS containing the warning text into the root directory of the anonymous ftp tree and the file or a link to the file into each user's home directory.

For machines that do not use these methods for displaying banners, consult the man pages for each service to see if there is a banner mechanism available. 

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you remove a service from a Unix machine, your machine will be more secure and you will not have to worry about placing a banner on that service. If you have open services that you do not need simply remove them. 

Important LBNL URLs

 

 

 

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