The question, I admit, is more than a little rhetorical but there are times when we dream of how great our lives would be without pesky users getting in the way and gumming up the cogs that make our systems run; however, the better we manage the user base on our Linux systems, the better CentOS will be to us. In reality, the more control we have over the users, the more life is better for them as they can continue their work uninterrupted by system downtime.
In this chapter, we will develop techniques to maintain unobtrusive control of our systems, keeping ourselves sane and the users happy. This will include:
Managing public and private groups: Understanding how we can use public groups and overriding the CentOS default of private groups can give us more scope in assigning permissions to users. We have to be aware of the potential pitfalls to each solution.
Getent: This can provide us with a global view of our users and groups and will open up to...