User Management in Solaris 10

Last month we looked at setting up Solaris 10. This time we'll look at its users' accounts management capabilities. Plus we'll talk about managing groups, templates and rights. 

Solaris 10 has replaced its admintool (Admin Management tool) with SMC (Solaris Management Console), which lets you manage-disks, users' accounts, network, mounting, sharing and patch management-from a single console.

To use it, start your Solaris 10 machine in the GUI mode, open a terminal console and issue the following command. 

# smc

This will open a Java-based Solaris 10 management console. The console screen is divided into two panels. The left side consists of all the objects in the Solaris machine, and the right side lets you configure or manage them.

Now let's see how to create new users and groups on Solaris 10 using this console. Go to the left panel of the console and 

navigate through Management tools>This computer>System Configuration>Users>Users Account and right click on the right window panel. From the context menu select Add Users>With Wizard; this will start a wizard that will let you create new users. On the wizard's opening screen, give the new user name and its description and click on Next. It will give you a user ID. Here
again click on Next. On the next screen you'll get two options 'User Account is locked' and 'User Must Use this Password At First
Login:' select the second option and assign a password to the user and click on Next. Then you need 

to set the user's primary group. For this select the primary group from the drop-down menu and click on Next. You'll be asked to specify the location of the user home
directory. By default it's '/export/home' but you can change it. Click on Next twice and you'll get to the final screen of the wizard, showing all the entries that you have fed while creating the user, if all entries are correct then click on Finish to create a new user.

Solaris 10's management console is a single tool that can mange your users, storage and performance from one place

Like users, you can also create user groups in the same way. Plus you can design templates, for users or a group, and use these templates instead of the wizard to create a quick user or group. To create a template, select 'Users Template' from the left panel and from the menu bar click on the 'Add User Template' icon. It will open a window, where you'll have to specify a name for the
template. On the same window you'll find six tabs (Password Option, Mail, Project, General, Group and Sharing). Select each of these tabs one-by-one, and fill in the information that is common for the specific sets of users, and then click on OK to save it. 

Once you've created the template, you can create new general and group with this. In certain cases you may need to assign rights to them after creating the user using template. To do this, select the user and double click on it. You will get a user property sheet in order to manage the properties of a particular user. Here select the rights that you want to provide to the user from the list and click on Add button.

Next time we'll explore the storage management features of Solaris 10. 

Sanjay Majumder