77 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext
77 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext
These screens allow you to add groups and users to your system.
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Many of the settings get reasonable defaults if you leave them blank.
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The first time you have entered the name of the new group or user, the
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system will show you what it would chose for most of these fields.
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You are free to change them, of course.
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User groups
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===========
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It's certainly almost generally a good idea to first create a new
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group for your users. Common names for such a group are "users", or
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even simply "other". Group names are used to control file access
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permissions for users that belong to the same group. Several group
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names are already used for system files.
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The numerical user or group IDs are often nothing you want to care for
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explicitly. If you don't fill in these fields, the system will choose
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reasonable defaults. However, these numbers (rather than the
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associated names) are what the operating system actually uses to
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distinguish users and groups -- hence they should normally be unique
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to each person or group, respectively.
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Users
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=====
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The user's login ID is a short (up to 15 characters) alphanumeric ID
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that the user must enter when logging into the system. It's often the
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initial letters of the user's name, and commonly used in lower case.
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It's also the local mail name for this user (though it's possible to
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also set up more descriptive mail alias names later).
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The user's login group determines which group access rights the user
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will initially get when logging in. If an additional list of groups is
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provided which the user will become a member of, (s)he will also be
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able to access files of those groups later without providing any
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additional password etc. Except for the "wheel" case mentioned below,
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the additional group membership list should normally not contain the
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login group again.
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The user's password can also be set here, and should be chosen with
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care - 6 or more characters, intermixing punctuation and numerics, and
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*not* a word from the dictionary or related to the username is a good
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password choice.
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Some of the system's groups have a special meaning. In particular,
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members of group "wheel" are the only people who are later allowed to
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become superuser using the command su(1). So if you're going to add a
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new user who should later perform administrative tasks, don't forget
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to add him to this group! (Well, ``he'' will most likely be yourself
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in the very first place. :)
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Also, members of group "operator" will by default get permissions for
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minor administrative operations, like performing system backups, or
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shutting down the system -- without first becoming superuser! So,
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take care when adding people to this group.
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The ``full name'' field serves as a comment only. It is also used by
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mail front ends to determine the real name of the user, hence you
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should actually fill in the first and last name of this user. By
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convention, this field can be divided into comma-separated subfields,
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where the office location, the work phone number, and the home phone
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number follow the full name of the user.
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The home directory is the directory in the filesystem where the user
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is being logged into, and where his personalized setup files (``dot
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files'', since they usually begin with a `.' and are not displayed by
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the ls(1) command by default) will be looked up. It is often created
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under /usr/home/ or /home/.
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Finally, the shell is the user's initial command interpreter. The
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default shell is /bin/sh, some users prefer the more historic
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/bin/csh. Other, often more user-friendly and comfortable shells can
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be found in the ports and packages collection.
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