Summary

In this chapter, we examined many concepts critical to user administration in Solaris 9. First, we looked at how to manage user and group accounts. Users can be managed through graphical interfaces, or the useradd, usermod, and userdel commands. Groups can also be managed through graphical interfaces, or the groupadd, groupmod, and groupdel commands. Each user has a login name and a User ID (UID). Each group has a group name and a Group ID (GID). UIDs and GIDs should be unique on the system.

We then looked at vital account configuration files. The files were /etc/passwd, which contains user accounts, /etc/shadow, which contains the user's encrypted password, and /etc/group, which contains group information.

From there, we moved on to a few miscellaneous user management commands. The who and last commands can show who is or was logged in. The su command can be used to switch users or assume a role, and the passwd command is used to change passwords on the system.

Finally, we looked at shells. The three most common shells in Solaris are Bourne, C, and Korn. Each shell has different features and acts as a command interpreter as well as a programming interface. Users will have initialization files that configure their environment at login. The specific initialization file, and the variables within, will depend on the user's shell.