Suse 9: Users management

Suse's handling of users and groups is similar to the one of most Linuxes:
/etc/passwd contains the list of the systems' users, with the usual logic;
/etc/shadow stores the crypted passwords and additional data about account expiration, notification times and the additional data provided by the shadows utilities.
/etc/group lists the system's groups with a logic similar to the one of many Unixes (but not the private group scheme where each user has his own group used in distros like RedHat).
The file /etc/login.defs contains various parameters of the default settings related to the users such as login retries and timeouts, default password expiration, maximum and minimum days for password changing, default UID and GID ranges (normal users start from UID 500 and GID 1000), default umask (022).

The management utilities are the usual ones:
useradd userdel usermod Add, remove and modify the system users
groupadd groupdel groupmod Add, remove and modify the system's groups.
Yast obvious gives the opportunity to configure easily all the parameters related to users management and permits the authentication to a remote server via various protocols: NIS, NIS+, Kerberos, LDAP, SMB.

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