On Saturday 15 March 2008 14:17, Jim Perrin wrote:
On Sat, Mar 15, 2008 at 10:11 AM, Anne Wilson
cannewilson@googlemail.com wrote:
system-config-users is giving me a problem. I need to create a user called 'groupware', without a home directory, and belonging only to a non-privileged group. I can create the user, but it sets it to belong to the group 'users'. When I try to set its default to 'nobody' and delete the 'users' entry it tells me that I must enter a home directory.
How can I get around this?
Mostly, you don't. Every user has to have a home directory, though nothing says it has to be in /home
Take a look at how the system accounts for things like rpm or rpc or others are handled. I'd also recommend using useradd as it gives you a bit more flexibility when creating users. with useradd you can use -g and -G to see the primary and secondary group memberships as you need. Also, unless this account will be logging in or for some other reason requires a shell, make sure that the shell for the user is set to /sbin/nologin.
That's helpful, thanks. It is for handling imap under kontact, so I've created the group groupware and left it as a member of that group. I think that will be OK, but I'll have to see when I've got the rest of it set up :-)
Anne