Adding a new user.

If the new user doesn't already have an account on our departmental machines, get the departmental sysadmins to add an account for him/her. Create a directory for the new user on /home/mercury. (You need to be root on uranus to do this). Our NIS servers are listed in the hosts file, which is in the CVS module local. Get the new user's existing /etc/passwd entry from a departmental machine, and then add it to /etc/passwd on the NIS master server (using adduser or useradd to be safe). The new entry should be below the "+::0:0:::" entry that divides the password file into the local users and the NIS users. Make sure that the new user's home directory on our machines is the one you created on /home/mercury. If the NIS master machine has an /etc/shadow file, add the user to that file as well. Make sure that the numerical user ids are identical to the ones on departmental machines.

Add the new user to group mercury in /etc/group on the NIS master server (using vigr to be safe).

If you did not copy an existing encrypted password, then set the password for the new user by executing "passwd " as root.

Then execute the following commands as root on the NIS master server to update the NIS database.

cd /var/yp
make

To make sure that the update to the NIS master is effective on a particular NIS client, restart the NIS daemon on that client.

Now add a directory on all the /home file systems that we have access to.

The user should be encouraged to subscribe to the Mercury mailing lists, and to add themself to the list of people involved in the Mercury project on the web page (w3/contact/include/people.inc in our CVS repository). You should also manually add the user to the mercury-local mailing list by modifying the file mulga:/etc/conf/mail/lists/mercury-local.

Last update was $Date: 2008-11-24 04:13:49 $ by $Author: zs $@cs.mu.oz.au.