Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Unit 4—Different User Configuration Methods


I thought that going through a few different methods to accomplish the same end goal was very edifying. I didn’t have any problems downloading or installing Webmin. I did run into some difficulties in Assignment 2—Add a User using the Command Line. Like many of my classmates on the forum, I couldn’t change the default shell to bin/bash, I entered the command multiple times and nothing changed. Since I read on the forum that changing the shell wasn’t a big deal for subsequent assignments, I just skipped it.

It was fun to try to use sudo on my new user’s account. That account wasn’t in the sudoers file, and the incident of the new user (Grendel) trying to use sudo was recorded. And then when I looked into the authlog on my primary account, I could see the evidence with the new user’s name (Grendel) in red. It was thoroughly amusing, since the new user, Grendel, is my cat. It was probably smart to not give him any administrative capabilities…

Adding a user using Gnome in the desktop VM was very easy. One interesting thing was that I didn’t feel a huge amount of relief going back to the GUI—I guess I am getting used to working in the command line. It was interesting comparing the user files from the desktop to the server. The desktop passwd and group files had a few syntactical differences from the server files.

Adding a user using Webmin was my favorite method. It was simple, but elegant. I felt comfortable enough using Webmin that I went back to my first new user’s (Grendel’s) file and changed the shell to bin/bash, since I was unable to do it on the command line. That simple fix of using an alternate method to accomplish the goal of changing a user’s shell is a great example of why it’s useful to learn multiple ways to accomplish something!

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