Pfft. 1. You don't disable the root account. ...at least, not unless you're already a charter member of the Sneaker Biathlon. You disable it for _remote login_, otherwise there'll come a day where you'll have to reboot the thing into single-user mode from the console just to fix something relatively trivial.
2. There's nothing wrong with manually editing /etc/passwd,shadow,group. Just *don't* screw it up, and *don't* do it if there's more than one admin involved. If anything, it's very important to know exactly what's supposed to go into each of those fields because some day you're probably going to need to be able to spot what someone else did to them. 3. If you're this separated from the basics of user management, automated server creation is a long ways off for you. Maybe it's time to take a little trip into the land of LFS, then come back to this idea once you've had a chance to see just how many pieces are actually involved. In summary, use the beefiest 64-bit machine you have to install Fedora or Ubuntu and *libvirtd* and *virt-manager*. It's just as easy to use as VMware's vSphere and VisualBox, and basically does everything you'd want it to. Absolutely use LVM for your disks, because it can create slices at will from the LVM disk pool. Proceed to do whatever dumb and ill-advised things you want to the VMs you can now spawn at will, knowing it won't take the whole machine offline. Mistakes on your own time are good for you, as long as you *learn* from your mistakes. Making mistakes on other people's time (particularly clients) not so much. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en
