Book Image

Webmin Administrator's Cookbook

By : Michal Karzynski
Book Image

Webmin Administrator's Cookbook

By: Michal Karzynski

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Webmin Administrator's Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Temporarily disabling a user account


If a person stops using your system, it's often a good idea not to delete their account, but rather to disable it. Perhaps you need to preserve data for forensic purposes, the user would need access to your system again in the future or is the owner of files on your system, which you don't want to delete or leave orphaned.

How to do it...

Disabling a user account through Webmin is very easy. Perform the following steps to do so:

  1. Navigate to System | Users and Groups, and click the username link of the account you want to edit.

  2. On the next page, check the box labeled Login temporarily disabled.

  3. Click Save.

    Tip

    You can re-enable the account by following the same procedure. Just uncheck the Login temporarily disabled box, and hit Save.

How it works...

To disable a user account, Webmin updates the /etc/shadow file, which stores hashed user passwords. The password hash for the selected user is prepended with an exclamation point (!). This invalidates the hash and makes...