Deploying Linux on IBM eServer pSeries Clusters

3.5. Local user management

Local users can be managed either by using the command line or with YaST. Usingthe command line, we issued the following command in order to create a new user:

# useradd -m gnu01

The option -m is used in order to create a default home directory. The contents of the default skeleton directory /etc/skel are copied to the newly created home. SuSE adds the new user to the group 100 users by default; there is no separate group created for every new user.

The file /etc/login.defs contains all the defaults for password setting, login retries, umask and path settings. The file /etc/shadow contains encrypted passwords.

Using YaST, we go to “Security Users” (or use the YaST shortcut “users”, as shown in Figure 3-2). YaST ...