Ephemeral user

Mount an overlay filesystem over a user's home directory with a temporary upper directory.

The idea is to have an ephemeral user for web browsing where you can reset the browser profile any time with minimum effort.

This package contains templates which can be processed and installed with make:

home-overlay:

a script to start and stop the overlay mount

home-overlay.service:

a systemd (1) service

clear:

a script to reset the ephemeral-users home directory

Makefile:

to install the package

Install

Run as root: make install. This creates the user ephemeral with disabled login if necessary, installs the necessary scripts and enables the systemd service.

Use make sudo-snippet to get a snippet you can paste into e.g. /etc/sudoers.d/local-browsing.

Options

TARGETUSER:

To choose a different user name use make install -e TARGETUSER=... (default: ephemeral).

PREFIX:

To select a different install prefix use make install -e PREFIX=... (default: /usr/local/).

Usage

(This assumes the user was "ephemeral".)

1. Prepare the ephemeral user's home directory, e.g. create a Firefox profile.
2. Start the overlay: sudo ephemeral-home-overlay start.
3. Start Firefox as the ephemeral user sudo -u ephemeral firefox.

To reset the ephemeral user's home directory, e.g. to clean the Firefox profile:

1. Stop Firefox.
2. Restart the home overlay: ephemeral-clear.

Audio

If you want to enable the ephemeral user to play audio via your main user's pulse audio add the following to your main user's ~/.config/pulse/default.pa:

#!/usr/bin/pulseaudio -nF

# Load system default config
.include /etc/pulse/default.pa

load-module module-native-protocol-unix auth-anonymous=1 socket=/tmp/pulse-main.socket

and create .config/pulse/client.conf for the ephemeral containing:

default-server = unix:/tmp/pulse-main.socket

See Arch Wiki.

Requirements

• sudo
• adduser

Recommended commands: * pgrep * notify-send