On Thu, 27 Feb 1997 KLE@SWE.GPPM.DE wrote:

> Hi there,

[snip]
> Yesterday I created a new user kle2 with an ID not the same
> as root and a new home dir /home/kle2. Then all worked fine with kl2, first.
> After several logins and logouts the same troubles occured as with 
> user kle. RiscBSD tells me when logging in as kle2 :" Don't login as root
> use su"  and asks me which termial I would like. The joke is that I do
> not have the rights as a 'real' root. For example I cannot start 
> X-Windows with the startx command. RiscBSD tells me that only root
> wants to do this.  Isn't it paradox ?
> How can I delete users ? Is it enough to delete the lines of the user
> in /etc/passwd and master.passwd or do I have to do more ?

master.passwd and passwd work like this:

master.passwd stores all the username information and their (encrypted)
	      password. It is only accessible by root and is only used for
	      adding and administrating users.

passwd is produced from master.passwd by the 'pwd_mkdb' program which at the
       same time adds information to the password database (/etc/spwd.db).

The point of all this is that

a) programs that want to can get information about users from /etc/passwd
(e.g. for finger, e-mail etc) and these programs *don't* need to be run as
root - this makies the system more secure.

b) a limited\ and smaller number of programs are alowed to read your password
from /etc/spwd.db, e.g. login, passwd itself, etc..

This is called password shadowing, it trys to prevent people getting other
peoples passwords.

So just removing lines in passwd and master.passwd will just confuse
everything. see these manual pages for more info...

man 5 passwd
man 8 pwd_mkdb
man 1 passwd
man 8 vipw
man 8 adduser

I've got a copy of the vi faq  (and numerous other ones) at:
http://quatermass.ivision.co.uk/RiscBSD/stuff.html

P.S. don't forget that if you've created the partitons for Risc BSD by
choosing the defaults then a user with a home directory of
/home/kle2 will be on the root partiton ('/') where they might not have much
space. It might be better to put them on /usr . use 'df -k' to see how much
space there is used on all your partitions (and try 'man df' while your
about it, and 'man mount' ;-) )

-- 
Jasper Wallace-Internet Vision | Caving-Acorn-RiscBSD-Chocolate-Banks-Fish
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