4.2. The Users and Groups Module

The Webmin module Users and Groups that is found under the System category (as shown in Figure 4.1) can be used to create, edit, and delete all the UNIX users and groups on your system. You should always be careful when using this module to edit existing system users like root and daemon because changing or deleting them could stop your system from working. Some users have their home directory set to / (the root directory). Deleting such a user would cause all the files on your system to be deleted!

In addition to managing the UNIX users on your system, this module can also affect user settings in other modules. For example, Samba has its own list of users and passwords that should be kept in sync with the UNIX password list. Webmin can handle this for you automatically using the other modules option that appears on the user creation, editing, and deletion forms. You must, however, enable this in every other module that you want automatically updated. The module also has options for synchronizing UNIX groups in a similar way, such as with Samba groups. However, since this feature only works with Samba 3.0, which is still under development, it is not covered in this chapter.

Once you enter the module, the main page lists all the users that currently exist on your system in one table (Figure 4.2), and all the groups in another (Figure 4.3). If there are too many users or groups to sensibly display in a table, then a small form allowing you to search for a user or group will be displayed instead.