I’m becoming the de-facto sysadmin for a single machine, to be used as a server for a small group of people. I’ve been using Linux for almost a decade now, but I’ve never set up a server for multiple users.

I imagine I’m not the only person who has done this. My plan is roughly as follows:

• Making a new user for everyone using useradd.
• Setting everyone up to use ssh and public-private key pairs so they can connect. (Everyone is on Mac OSC and/or some flavor of Linux.)
• Installing anaconda to /opt, and modifying everyone’s .bashrc (or, alternatively, modifying /etc/profile if that’s better?)
• Setting up a default environment with numpy, jupyter-lab, and other common data science tools.
• Showing everyone how to SSH tunnel jupyter-lab and run it in their browser.
• Basic security measures (fail2ban, no SSH password auth, etc.) and checking with my organizations IT to make sure things work properly.

I’m still wondering… * Lock the base conda environment, so that people have to make child environments and can’t modify the base. * Is this the best way to set up Anaconda for multiple users? Is /usr/bin a better place to put it? Etc. * Would there be any bottlenecking issues with multiple people using ssh and tunneling on the same port?