#3 Users & privileges

The root user is an admin account - it is allowed to change any files in the system. Performing daily tasks as the root is therefore risky. A simple mistake while typing a command can have unintended consequences.

It's a good practice to create a regular user account. A regular user (i.e. not root) is only allowed to modify the files they have created. The regular user can still access the superuser "powers" when needed, but he has to do so explicitly. This is done by prefixing a command with sudo. The user needs to be a so called sudoer to be able to use the sudo command.

We need a create a new sudo user on our server. The user id of such a user must be included in the sudoers file.

First, let's add a new user juraj. We will be prompted to create a new password and some user's details. We can skip the irrelevant ones by pressing Enter.

root@server:~# sudo adduser juraj
Adding user `juraj' ...
Adding new group `juraj' (1000) ...
Adding new user `juraj' (1000) with group `juraj' ...
Creating home directory `/home/juraj' ...
Copying files from `/etc/skel' ...
New password:
Retype new password:
passwd: password updated successfully
Changing the user information for juraj
Enter the new value, or press ENTER for the default
        Full Name []: Juraj Majerik
        Room Number []:
        Work Phone []:
        Home Phone []:
        Other []:
Is the information correct? [Y/n] Y

Next, we need to add the new user to the sudo group. This command does that by updating the /etc/sudoers files with the id of the user.

root@server:~# sudo adduser juraj sudo
Adding user `juraj' to group `sudo' ...
Adding user juraj to group sudo
Done.

Finally, we can check if the user contains the sudo group. We can see that the sudo group (id=27) is indeed present.

root@server:~# id juraj
uid=1000(juraj) gid=1000(juraj) groups=1000(juraj),27(sudo)

Now I can login to my server as juraj:

ssh juraj@api.jurajmajerik.com