Closer To The Ideal

What does the classic Linux file system look like. This is the best diagram I’ve ever seen.

I had to do some system administration on the company server yesterday. I’ve two things to note.

1.) This is a nice list of commands for user management.

2.) Plesk makes normal system administration a nightmare. It sets up its own config files that override the defaults for most of the software on a Linux system. While Plesk makes some tasks easy for non-technical people, it makes normal system administration (where you ssh to the server) a real pain. You can follow some tutorial exactly, like the directions for adding a user on this page, and your work has no effect. Last night I was able to set up a user account, but was not able to set a working password. Turns out the passwords were controlled by Plesk.

[Added later:] Okay, I’m an idiot. I was trying to create a user account like this:

useradd -groot -Gadm,wheel,psacln -s/bin/bash -p947364 -d/home/lawrence -m lawrence

The helpful tech staff at RackSpace wrote (in reply to my question) that this command expects the password to be encrypted. So the correct way to add a user (at least on a RackSpace server running RedHat Linux) is as follows:

1.) ssh to the server using some non-root account

2.) after you log in, su to root

3.) run the above command without the password

4.) then run this command:

passwd lawrence

5.) then type in the password you want for the user “lawrence”

System administration is not my strong point. However, today I had to create some users and groups on a Redhat Linux box that serves websites for Bluewall. I was lucky to find a helpful tutorial, however, when I tried to run the commands as it describes, I ran into this problem:

[root@www httpdocs]# groupadd devteam
bash: groupadd: command not found

Command not found? How could that be? I asked my friend Chris Clarke about this, as he knows more about sysadmin that I do. He wrote back:

Try ‘/usr/sbin/useradd’

If that doesn’t work: ‘updatedb’ then ‘locate *useradd’

His first suggestion was what I needed. This worked perfectly:

[root@www httpdocs]# /usr/sbin/groupadd devteam