Hi,

I'm by no means a newbie here, but I just ran into something (simple?) I can't solve.

I have a Mandrake 9.2 box for my research with student (user) accounts. For a while, my account has been the only one on the machine and all has been well...

However, in creating new account yesterday for a new student in a new group, I tested the log in (tcsh), and found that I could not execute nearly anything "normal" (such as date, ls, etc.). Thinking it was a path issue, I saw the path was set correctly.

I struggled with this for a long time, and eventually set the shell to bash, which my (personal) account uses. Now, that user can execute a command, but when I tried to do a 'man' on a command (say 'man date'), the man pages find nothing.

I have no idea what the hell is going on here, but something weird certainly is.

Can this be an msec thing? How do I determine the current "level" of security I'm currently in, so that I can poke around with the settings?

What other things might I be missing? Does the new group need to have special permissions for basic fundamental activities? I've never run across this before...

(Also, I need to set up quotas for the newest users. How do I go about this? Is it a kernel switch/recompile? Is it a rpm? The machine does not run a window server, so I interface with it via the command line.)

I struggled with this for a long time, and eventually set the shell to bash, which my (personal) account uses. Now, that user can execute a command, but when I tried to do a 'man' on a command (say 'man date'), the man pages find nothing.
User has access to regular stuff like man pages, slocate database, /usr tree?
If you do 'strace -v -eopen man date 2>&1|grep ".=.\-1."', what errors does it return?


Can this be an msec thing? How do I determine the current "level" of security I'm currently in, so that I can poke around with the settings?
Soz. Can't tell you. I ain't a Mandy user.


(Also, I need to set up quotas for the newest users. How do I go about this? Is it a kernel switch/recompile? Is it a rpm? The machine does not run a window server, so I interface with it via the command line.)
Rpm. Install it, set up /etc/quota.conf (and reporting cronjob), then initialise quota's on each partition you need quota's on.

I just set up an account on my computer with a security level of ¨higher¨. I am seeing the same thing you are. On the account that I use I set myself up as members of the groups:
adm, wheel, rpm, xgrp, ntools, ctools.
The account that I just created is a member of the groups: prog, wheel, games & ctools.

I did a google search for ntools group. Following is an excerpt from this website:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+WinNT-7.html
I believe that the track that you want to be on is to find out which group memberships allow which access right to users.

There is a program called ´adduserdrake´ that you might want to use when entering new users.

There are selection boxes for various group memberships that you can add to new user accounts as you enter them and a brief discription on what they allow. It´s a start I hope.

Good Luck!

Well, it would seem that the groups you folks have identified are the ones I need. Sadly, I can't find any docuementation on the full list of groups and what they do. Looks like I'll have to guess.

The adduserdrake program did start up via my tty terminal, but I could not get out of it and had to "CTRL-Z" to get out and then kill the process. Next time, I'll stick to webmin.

Finally quotas. URPMI -y can't find aynthing about 'quota'. Is there another package name for the RPM for the quota software?

Thanks one and all.

I am not sure but quota may be one of the core-utils. Try urpmf quota or urpmq quota. They may tell you which package that quotas is on.

If you download the user manual from the Mandrake site, I believe there is a section with that various groups are used for. Many of them are pretty standard, so googling may be fruitful.