Comments on: HowTo Disable a User Account in Linux

By: Delicious Bookmarks for October 2nd through October 3rd « Lâmôlabs

Delicious Bookmarks for October 2nd through October 3rd « Lâmôlabs — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 04:06:12 +0000

[...] HowTo Disable a User Account in Linux | MDLog:/sysadmin – October 3rd ( tags: linux admin sysadmin account disable tip trick ) [...]

By: Buanzo

Buanzo — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 14:54:37 +0000

You should use usermod –expiredate 1 instead of passwd -l.
Passwd -l does not disable an account, just makes the password unusable, but the user could still login using an ssh key or other auth meth.

By: Hasibullah

Hasibullah — Sat, 14 May 2011 12:49:55 +0000

Sallam Dear sir!

I have been working with Linux for many months, i just wanted to ask you that how can we disable a group of users. is there a way to do so.
if yes please reply

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 03:25:35 +0000

@Marius: Solved! Observed behaviour is exactly as you described it to be. I added an “Email disabled” tag. Many thanks indeed.

By: - Marius -

- Marius - — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 22:20:05 +0000

@Michael: you should be able to use :fail: for what you are looking for. You can add a message at the with your custom error for this. something like:
user : :fail: User unknown.

ps. sorry I can’t test this out as I don’t have any exim servers right now (using mostly postfix these days). Let me know if that doesn’t work.

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 22:09:02 +0000

@Marius, thanks, I did try :fail. The system silently drops the email. But I want to send a “user unknown” or some kind of reject notification. I’m assuming that :fail will accept the entire message. Whereas I want to reduce the toll on bandwidth by dropping/erroring the connection when the agent sends the recipient information. With :fail, people who are legitimately trying to email the account will think that the recipient is alive (I’d prefer them to know that the message failed). Thanks again, Michael.

By: - Marius -

- Marius - — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 18:25:46 +0000

@michael: in that case you would create an alias for your user in exim (/etc/aliases or similar) and send it to :fail or :blackhole or even to /dev/null based on your preference

By: michael

michael — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 13:59:34 +0000

A slightly different requirement. I need to only disable email for a user.

I’ve quit a mailing list, I want to keep the user account that I created the mailing list for. I just want to disable email reception because of all the spam. Essentially, I want exim to tell anyone emailing to that account (externally) to get lost.

I can’t seem to google out the answer :/

By: Peter Serwe

Peter Serwe — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 22:13:16 +0000

The simplistic sysadmin approach:

save a copy of /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow somewhere safe, in case you’re a numbnut and wipe out your files.

Delete the line for the user in both files.

Voila.. user is locked out.

Peter

By: raza

raza — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 12:09:48 +0000

works better