User Management

Starting off with a warning:

Old or Outdated

This file is old, and I have yet to proof read it since I last wrote it, which was like, a million years ago or something, so one: take it with a grain of salt; and two: I’m sorry if its wrong! Please, feel free to open an issue on the corresponding github page: Issues · jpartain89/Software-Install-Guides · GitHub

Technically, for proper security and the Linux Way, you’re supposed to have specific, security-neutered, non-home-directory-having users running these different programs. Helps stop any random, drive-by-login attempts, or rogue access if your password or keys were to ever get out.

So, if we want to go the right way, we would create a user that has no shell access, isn’t allowed to actually log in, but is able to run programs.

sudo adduser --system --group <program-name> --home <default/program-files/location> <username>

the <> blocks, replace the text and <> with your info.

So, lets break that down:

  1. --system dictates that this is a system-type user account, which means that, by default, this user is:

  • placed into the nogroup group by default

  • a home directory is normally created for this user with the same rules as a normal user.

  • the new user will have the shell /bin/false set

  • and the user will have logins disabled by default.

  1. --group - the man document states: “When combined with –system, a group with the same name and ID as the system user is created.”

  2. --home states that the location following the flag is the users home directory, which, if you already have the files there, it will display a non-fatal error. You can ignore it for now.

Then, after creating that user, you want to make sure the program files are owned by that user.

sudo chown -R <user>:<group> /opt/files

Note

The -R means its recursively applied. To all files.

The other thing we also want to pay attention to is whether we have external drives mounted on our system. If we are running our Linux Software in a VirtualMachine - thus changing the way items might be mounted - then we need to pay attention to what users/groups are assigned to those external drives/directories that we might need access to so we can process/watch/download/etc. properly!

So, for running this inside of a VirtualBox instance locally, using a folder mounted through VBox, they have a custom group for the file ownership in the machine, vboxsf. So, to allow users to have access to read-write on these directories:

sudo usermod -aG vboxsf $USER

Note

So, the -aG part is adding a user to a group by addition, not replacing. Then, the first name is the group, and the 2nd is the user.

Usually in order to have the addition take in the filesystem, you would log the user out then back in, but the system users normally don’t have login/out abilities. So, its best to just restart the actual virtual machine.