THE FOLLOWING ARE SOLARIS 2.X USER/GROUP ADMIN TIPS

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Creating Groups
Creating Users

What are Groups?

Groups are a categorizing of users. For example, users within your organization have widely varied duties. You have engineers, payroll, sales and many more. You do not want your sales force peering into your payroll database and you probably do not want your payroll people messing around with your engineering files.

Therefore, you want to place certain individuals within particular groups to better control security and access priviledges to secure areas.

To create groups you simply run admintool as superuser or, if you are part of the sysadm group, you would have permission as well.

• Choose the group area of admintool
  
• From the menu, choose add group
  
• Fill in the group information including, Group Name, Group ID and Member List
  
• Click OK or Apply and your done

Group Name is any unique name you wish to give to the group, ie. payroll. Group ID is a unique numeric identifier and Member List is a list of users who belong to this group and thus have access rights to files own by this group.

You would probably want to create as many groups as you know you would need at this point. During the next phase, creating users, you will need to assign users to a primary group, as well as, secondary groups.

Creating users is also quite straight forward with the admintool. After choosing the user area of admintool and selecting add user from the edit menu, fill in the appropriate information. Below is a discussion of the fields to be filled in and what you should use.

User Identity

User Name - an arbitrary and unique name which is used by the user during login
User ID - a unique number identifier representation of the user. (Start numbering from 100 and up)
Primary Group - The group to assign the user to as established above in creating groups.
Secondary Groups - Other groups to which this user may have access to
Comment - Usually the full name of the user is placed here
Login Shell - Choose the shell that the user will operate within. (C, Bourne or Korn)

Account Security

Password - Choose normal password from the selection list and assign a password. This password can later be changed by the user provided they adhere to the password aging information provided by the administrator.
Min Change - The minimum number of days that must pass before the user can change their password. Limits the user from changing passwords daily or more frequently.
Max Change - The maximum number of days allowed to pass before user is required to change their password.
Max Inactive - The maximum number of days a login account can be inactive before the user is required to change their password.
Expiration Date - A set date by which the user account will expire and therefore not allow login attempts by that username.
Warning - The number of days the user will be warned before any password changes must take place.

Home Directory

Create Home Dir - Click to check if you want to create the users home directory or not.
Path - Enter the full path to where the users directory will reside.

Click OK or Apply and your done. The user will now be able to login and start using the system with the given security issues regarding their group account.

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If you have any problems that do not appear or can be found via this guide, please feel free to contact Star Systems Engineering, Inc. by emailing support@starinc.com.