What You Can Do With Admintool

Admintool is a graphical user interface that enables you to set up user accounts on a local system.

Modify User Accounts

Unless you define a user name or UID number that conflicts with an existing one, you should never need to modify a user account's login name or UID number. Use the following steps if two user accounts have duplicate user names or UID numbers:

• If two user accounts have duplicate UID numbers, use Admintool to remove one account and re-add it with a different UID number. You cannot use Admintool to modify a UID number of an existing user account.

• If two user account have duplicate user names, use Admintool to modify one of the accounts and change the user name.

  If you do use Admintool to change a user name, the home directory's ownership is changed (if a home directory exists for the user).

One part of a user account that you can change is a user's group memberships. Admintool Modify option lets you add or delete a user's secondary groups. Alternatively, you can use the Groups window to directly modify a group's member list.

You can also modify the following parts of a user account:

• Comment

• Login shell

• Passwords

• Home directory

• AutoHome setup

• Credential table setup

• Mail server

Delete User Accounts

When you delete a user account with Admintool, the software deletes the entries in the passwd and group files. In addition, you can delete the files in the user's home directory and delete the contents of the user's mailbox.

Only the single mail alias that directs mail to the user's mail box is deleted; the user name is not deleted from any other mail aliases. If you want to delete entries from mail aliases other than the one set up to direct mail to your mailbox, you must delete them by hand.

Add Customized User Initialization Files

Although you can't create customized user initialization files with Admintool, you can populate a user's home directory with user initialization files located in a specified "skeleton" directory.

You can customize the user initialization templates in the /etc/skel directory and then copy them to users' home directories.

Administer Passwords

You can use Admintool for password administration, which includes specifying a normal password for a user account, enabling users to create their own passwords during their first login, disabling or locking a user account, or specifying expiration dates and password aging information.

Password aging is not supported by the NIS name service.

Disable User Accounts

Occasionally, you may need to temporarily or permanently disable a login account. Disabling or locking a user account means that an invalid password, *LK*, is assigned to the user account, preventing future logins.

The easiest way to disable a user account is to use Admintool to lock the password for an account. You can also enter an expiration date in the Expiration Date field to set how long the user account is disabled.

Other ways to disable a user account is to set up password aging or by just changing the user's password.