[CentOS] User creation problem

Sat Mar 15 16:20:23 UTC 2008
Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com>

On Sat, 2008-03-15 at 15:13 +0000, Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Saturday 15 March 2008 14:55, Brian wrote:
> > Anne Wilson wrote:
> > > On Saturday 15 March 2008 14:17, Jim Perrin wrote:
> > >> On Sat, Mar 15, 2008 at 10:11 AM, Anne Wilson
> > >>
> > >> <cannewilson at 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?
> > >
> > > 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 :-)
> > >
> >
> > As a side note to what craig said. I to use /dev/null to give my other
> > stations a user account so as to add them to the samba user file.
> > Without giving them an home dir.
> > HTH
> 
> I set the home directory under /usr/share/, thinking that was a fairly safe 
> place, but it's not working, so I don't know whether this is the cause of the 
> problem or something else.  I'm trying to get advice from the kde-pim list.  
> dimap is something new to me - I've used plain imap for some time, but while 
> that works well for mail it doesn't allow me remote diary and addressbook.
----
/usr/share is a really bad idea...
- selinux
- goes against intended purpose
  http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#PURPOSE26
- just a plain bad idea.

home directories should be in /home with the sole exception of daemon
users (uid < 500) which will typically be created in /var or /var/lib

Craig