Answers

Q Blocked user

I’m running Ubuntu Server and once I’ve created a user, I cannot log in as that user. When I run: where roroot as a group set up for read-only access to all files. So it looks like the user has been created correctly – what could be wrong?

R C Ellis

A You need to also set a password for that user. There is a --password option to useradd , but it requires that you give the password in its encrypted form – useradd does not do the encryption for you. This would explain the authentication failure as you are trying to login with the ‘wrong’ password.

You can add the password by specifying its plain-text form by running the passwd command after adding the user: Also bear in mind that the useradd command does not create a home directory for the user, although it does add the path to that directory into . This will also result in an error on login as the shell cannot to the user’s home directory. You need to give the --create-home or -m option to have the directory created in the correct place with suitable ownership. The default for this is , but you can change this with the --home-dir or -d option if you wish the home