- User Accounts and Permissions
- Who Needs What? Managing Groups
- Passwords: The First Line of Security
- Monitoring User Activity
- Letting Mortals Play at Wizardry: SuperUsers
- References
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Who Needs What? Managing Groups
Groups are the easy way to handle the need-to-know issues that always crop up when dealing with users on a network. Create a group when there is a set of people who need to have similar permission to work on particular files or directories.
As with users, there are two types of groups in openSUSE: Local and System. Generally speaking, Local groups are composed of real-life users, and System groups are for managing applications and their files.
Every user on a openSUSE system is assigned to the Users group, so common permissions can be set up for everyone. By default, all users are also assigned to the Dialout and Video groups, although this can be changed in YaST.
Adding Groups
Adding a new Local group to your system is very much like adding a user. From the YaST Security and Users section, choose Group Management. You can also come to this page directly from the User Management page by clicking the option button. On this page, you will see the existing Local groups (by default, just the Users group). Click Set Filter and then click System Groups to look at those groups instead.
To define a group of writers on this system, click Add to display the screen shown in Figure 19.4.
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Figure 19.4 Adding a Writers group.
This process is straightforward. The only thing you have to do is to name the group and identify its members from the list of local and system users on the right. If you want to set a group password for extra security, define that here as well. YaST sets the default Group ID (GID) number starting at 1000. You can change this, but there's no real need to.
When you have checked the box of the members of the group, click Accept to create the group and return to the main page. You should see the Writers group on the list of Local Groups, along with its membership. You can add and remove members through this screen, and also through the User screen.
Click Finish to confirm your changes and close this window. Now you can choose to restrict some files and directories to the Writers group by assigning those files and directories to the Writers group and setting appropriate permissions.