User Account Administration - Solaris 9 System Administrator - page 56

Introduction
This chapter covers the administration of user and group accounts, the sys-
tem files used to store the user and group account information, and the ini-
tialization files associated with user accounts.

Account Administration
User and group accounts control access to the system. The administration of
user accounts and group accounts along with the passwords associated with
these accounts is a key system administration activity.

User Accounts
User accounts can be added, modified, or deleted using command-line utili-
ties or by using the admintool(1M) command. Use of the admintool com-
mand reduces or eliminates the possible introduction of typos and other
errors that might affect all the user accounts.

However, the admintool command requires a graphical interface and is more
time consuming than using the command-line utilities manually. These com-
mand-line utilities are as follows:

➤ useradd(1M)

➤ usermod(1M)

➤

userdel(1M)

Both the admintool command and the command-line utilities are described
in this chapter.

Creating an Account Using the admintool Command
When the admintool command is started, the Users window is displayed. To
display the Add User window, select Add from the Edit pull-down menu.
The Add User window, consists of three sections: User Identity, Account
Security, and Home Directory.

The User Identity section provides the information that needs to be defined
to add a user account. All this information is stored in the /etc/passwd file,
except secondary groups information, which is stored in the /etc/group file.
Table 3.1 lists the fields of the User Identity section.