Fellow users!

In order to increase security of user’s accounts, while also ensuring the privacy for users, we are going to be changing how we do account recovery.

For new users, at account creation time, we will be writing the file out that contains the email address used at creation time. The file will be located at:

~/.thunix/recovery

This will be the only email address we will accept, or send new credentials to. Users are free to remove this file at any time (We will never re-create it), or to change the contents from an email address, to a passphrase.

If we see a non-email address in there, we will accept the passphrase as proof of identity. You can even combine them!

So, your ~/.thunix/recovery file could contain:

ubergeek@thunix.net or "I really love Mountain Dew!"

Or:

ubergeek@thunix.net

Or:

I really love Mountain Dew!

It is not intended to be machine readable, and the only time an admin will look at this file is if we get a request for credentials reset.

If this file does not exist, or is empty, we cannot accept credentials changes. This is to ensure your account doesn’t get taken over by another party.

Please, create this file at your earliest convenience. You can do it like so:

mkdir ~/.thunix; echo "email@example.com" > ~/.thunix/recovery; chmod 600 ~/.thunix/recovery