I am very new to linux but am familiar enough with unix to at least know my way around from a user perspective (ie man pages, setting up my shell etc). However I need to admin a new linux box (it already has linux installed and ssh setup) and I need to setup DNS, apache, php/perl, mysql, moodle, and sendmail.

I think I can handle the installs, what I need to know is what is the minimal set of users I should create? The only user on there now is root and I feel like I need to have a "webapps" user or something like that under which all these apps (apache, mysql, etc) will run. Should I have a seperate user for moodle and php as well? Should I have a seperate "web admin" and "web developer" user? The latter for when I need to upload new scripts, html, etc when developing applications.

Any guidance or pointers to resources would be great! thanks.

Andrew

Hi and welcome to LQ.

For starters, you should not be doing day to day stuff as root. Try to stick to using the root account for sysadmin purposes. Most server applications like mysql and apache, create their own system users if you use the packages shipped by your distribution. This means that you do not have to create dedicated users for these server applications unless you compiled them from source.