Unit 4 Class Assignment: Adding Users and Groups

For the first time I had almost no problems running through our course exercises. Unit 4 deals largely with permissions and adding users and groups. Our main focus was learning how to add a user and group via the command line and then comparing that with a couple of GUI management tools.

To aid myself in working in the shell, and for future reference, I began writing the basic commands and articles on post it notes and putting them around my desk for easy reference. I used a simple name I could remember for the second user and using the various "sudo" commands as directed was able to add the new user, who was automatically added to a group, and then verify that all went well.

Next we used the Gnome Desktop Utility and being a GUI it not only went well it not only was very intuitive but allowed me to add additional information like contact phone number and address. That was a feature I didn't notice right away with the other adduser utilities. Also Gnome is a feature within the Ubuntu desktop. Opening it was a simple as going to the drop down menus and selecting the application.

Finally we used Webmin and of the three it was probably the easiest to use for actually adding users. The installation was a little more complex as we had to run some aptitude commands to install and configure it. Again I had no problems but had I made one typo or overlooked something I probably would have had different results. Webmin has a very friendly user interface but lacks the advantage of being fully integrated into the desktop (like Gnome) or as simply a part of the system like like the command line.

Altogether I really liked all three ways to add users and if I had to choose would probably use Webmin. However, one thing I wonder about is if you didn't just stick with one utility to add users and groups what issues would you have. Would one utility wipe out the functionality of a user that was created with a different utility if their formatting does not makes sense to each other.