[Ref: adduser(8), userdel(8), FAQ 10 - System Management]
Table of Contents
adduser support two flags -silent or -verbose. You don’t really need to know these at the beginning, but you can check the details in the man pages. Read through the example below and then start adduser to create your new account with root access privileges.
# adduser
Enter username [a-z0-9_-]: **bricker**
Enter full name [ ]: **Sven De La Palmer**
Enter shell bash csh ksh nologin sh [bash]: **<hit ENTER>**
The shell is your command line interpreter. It reads in the commands you type and tries to decipher them. There are several different shells to choose from. If bash does not show on the screen, then review adding packages in the previous section. You can change your settings at a later time so do not worry if some settings are not as you want them right now. The documentation that comes with OpenBSD says that ‘most people’ use bash, strange how they don’t make it the default though.
Enter home directory (full path) [/home/bricker]: **<hit ENTER>** Uid [1002]: **<hit ENTER>**
The uid is the User ID number that the system uses to keep track of people. These should be unique on the system. Use the default values offered by the program unless you have good knowledge of previously granted ID numbers.
Enter login class: default []: **<hit ENTER>**
The login class allows you to set up resource limits for groups of users.
Login group bricker [bricker]: **<hit ENTER>** Login group is "bricker". Invite bricker into other groups: guest no [no]: **wheel**
Important: Your administrator account should be a member of the group wheel. Regular users of your host should not be members of the wheel group. If this is your 1st account for the machine (and presumably your account) then I suggest you add the account to the group “wheel.” Login groups are used to divide security privileges by account groups. The group ‘wheel’ is generally used for administrators with special privileges including the ability to su (switch user) to the SuperUser. Accounts who are not members of the group ‘wheel’ cannot gain root access remotely. Invite user accounts you wish to grant special security rights into the group ‘wheel,’ or create a separate security group for people who need to work together. Do not group normal users into wheel.
Enter password []: Enter password again []:
You will be asked for the user’s password twice and it will not be displayed. Afterwards, it will display all of the user’s information and ask if it is correct.
Name: bricker Password: **** Fullname: Sven De La Palmer Uid: 1000 Gid: 1000 (bricker) Class: Groups: bricker wheel HOME: /home/bricker Shell: /bin/sh OK? (y/n) [y]: **<hit ENTER>**
If you make a mistake, you can start over, or its possible to correct most of this information using the ‘chpass’ command (discussed below).
[Ref: What to do AFTER you have BSD installed by Chris Coleman, http://www.daemonnews.org/200005/chrisc@daemonnews.org
Once you’ve configured the base system for working, we can look at basic configuration of users. Note, for those with some previous Unix experience, Do not just edit /etc/passwd or /etc/Master.passwd
Use the chpass(1) utility when adding or changing user information. If you try to modify the user shell selection manually (by changing /etc/passwd) it wont work, trust me I’ve made this mistake for weeks before I found out my errorneous ways.
Entered at the command line without a parameter (ie. typed by itself,) chpass will edit your personal information. As root, you can use it to modify any user account on the system. You can find more details on chpass in the man pages, but let’s go through an example review of the account we created above.
# **chpass bricker**
This will bring up information about the user ‘bricker’ in the ‘vi’ editor. The password line is encrypted, so don’t change it. If you want to disable the user, one method would be to add a # at the beginning of the password string, so you can easily remove it later when you want to reactivate the user. There are methods of disabling user that may be better though.
Login: bricker Password: Uid [#]: 1000 Gid [# or name]: 1000 Change [month day year]: Expire [month day year]: Class: Home directory: /home/bricker Shell: /bin/sh Full Name: Sven De La Palmer Office Location: Office Phone: Home Phone: Other information: ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ /path/temp-file: unmodified: line 1
Remember your vi commands ? :q (colon+q) quit, :w(colon+w) write, :q! (colon+q+exlamation-mark) quit without saving. If you’re still having problems, remember the tutorial
[Ref: What to do AFTER you have BSD installed by Chris Coleman ]
Files: .bash_profile, and .bashrc
Since I like using the Bash shell largely due to my ignorance about the other shells, here is an example of the files for initialisation. The two user files which contain the shell settings are ~/.bash_profile, and ~/.bashrc.
Note that these are templates and there are some things that MUST be changed. I’ve put [path-to-….] as designators of specific paths that have to be set by the user/admin.
File: ~/.bash_profile
# .bash_profile
#
# Things loaded once per session (by the login manager).
#
# Source of global definitions
if [ -f /etc/bashrc ]; then
. /etc/bashrc
fi
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin
# Define variables useful for OpenBSD Installations
#
PKG_PATH=/**[path-to-packages]**/packages/i386
export PKG_PATH PATH
# Change the prompt to give current directory (\W) and
# $ if regular user -or- # if root (\$).
PS1='\[\033[1;30m\]\u@\h:\w \$\[\033[0m\] '
export PS1
# Useability Items
export MANPAGER=less
File: ~/.bashrc
# .bashrc # Put in here variables and stuff to be launched by subinvocations # of bash (like /usr/local/bin/bash) PS1='\[\033[1;30m\]\u@\h:\w \$\[\033[0m\] ' export PS1
The tilde ~ is used here to refer to the home directory of the current user. Therefore if you are logged in as ‘bricker’ then typing in cd ~ should put you in the directory /home/bricker. Likewise if you edit the file ~/.bash_profile the file is actually created as /home/bricker/.bash_profile. If you were to su (switch user) to root and then type cd ~ you should be moved to /root the home directory for root.