RHCSA9 Exam Series: Manage Users and Groups

RHCSA9 Exam Series - Manage Users and Groups

In this article, we will review a scenario that may appear on the RHCSA9 exam. The RHCSA9 exam series articles are designed to increase your knowledge, skills, and confidence regarding the exam. However, practice makes perfect so, practice…practice…practice!!

Table of Contents

Introduction

Before we begin, this article assumes that you already have running instances of RHEL9 or CentOS9 at your disposal. If not, you may reference the following articles for RHEL7 or CentOS8 installation procedures. You’ll find the instructions for installing RHEL9 are similar with a few obvious exceptions (e.g. you’ll download a different .iso).
RHCSA Exam Series: Introduction Feature Image

Image by Oussama Bergaoui from Pexels

Lab Objectives: Environment Setup

To adhere completely to the lab instructions, you’ll need three(3) separate running instances or virtual machines (also referred to as nodes). You can name them what you want but for simplicity sake, we’ll name each machine as follows:
				
					. node1.infotechys.example.com
. node2.infotechys.example.com
. node3.infotechys.example.com
You can still complete this lab with fewer nodes as the instructions will accommodate different scenarios. **READ ALL OF THE INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE STARTING THE LAB**

Also, make sure to save off image backups of your nodes or take snapshots of the machine’s state before starting this lab. It will allow you to revert to a clean slate and repeat the labs as many times as you need.

RHCSA9 Exam Series: Lab Instructions

You will create the following nine(9) users (study table below) and groups across your nodes. Assign each user the same password for now and set it to: pumpkin3.14

  • On node1: Create users jbaker, asmith, and rflock
  • On node2: Create users jsand, clonghorn, and kbarnes
  • On node3: Create users acloud, cparker, and dgaines
  • On all nodes: Create groups students, substitutes, and faculty

If you have two nodes available, create the first five(5) users on the first node and the remaining users on the second. Also, all nine(9) users can be created on a single node.

Username

User ID

Supplementary Group names

Group ID

Password Expiration

Password

Reset

Joseph Baker (jbaker)

 

students

 

60

 

Anne Smith (asmith)

7552

students

7600

60

 

Robert flock (rflock)

 

students

 

60

 

Justin Sand (jsand)

7553

substitutes

 

30

Change password upon first login

Cindy Longhorn (clonghorn)

7554

substitutes

 

30

Change password upon first login

Kathy Barnes (kbarnes)

7555

substitutes

 

30

Change password upon first login

Andy Cloud (acloud)

7556

faculty

8005

90

 

Crystal Parker (cparker)

 

faculty

 

90

 

David Gaines (dgaines)

 

faculty

 

90

 

Lab Instructions: Group Memberships and Permissions

  • In addition to the groups they already belong to, add Justin and Cindy to the faculty group.
  • On node1: Create a directory called summer_2022 under /usr/local and allow the root user and students group read, write, and execute permissions.
  • On node2: Create a directory called sub_projects under /opt and allow the root user and substitutes group read, write, and execute permissions.
  • On node2: Create a file called test1.txt under /opt/sub_projects as user kbarnes.

Lab Instructions: Sudo permissions

  • Grant superuser privileges to the faculty group such that members belonging to the faculty group, can become root on each node.

Lab Instructions: Umask Settings

  • Set the umask for users or owners and groups for Robert, Andy, and Anne such that write and execute permissions are prohibited. Also, no permissions should be allowed to others.

Lab Instructions: Change default settings

  • On all nodes: Change default settings so that newly created user and group IDs start from 8500.
  • On node1: Create a new user account for Thomas Smith. He should belong to the same group(s) with similar password settings as user Andy Cloud.

NOTE: Challenge yourself!  Set a timer before starting this lab and try to complete the tasks above in 30 minutes or less. The RHCSA exam is three(3) hours long which is plenty of time–IF and only IF–you manage it wisely!!

Additional Resources

Some useful documentation and blog pages related to the topic reviewed in this article can be found at the following URLs:

Conclusion

Congratulations! You’ve just completed the Manage Users and Groups section of the RHCSA9 exam series. If it took you a while to complete, keep practicing until you can get it done in a shorter time period. Click this link for the answer page and compare your results. Was this article helpful to you? If so, leave us some feedback in the comments section. We’d love to hear from you.

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