Ok.. I'm silly.. but how do I make an Admin account?

Usually most servers I have leased already came with both admin and root account setup… But this latest server came with only the root account… and no admin.
Personally I find that a threat to login with root directly, so I’d like to have an admin account to login with, and want to disable direct root login via shell.

I know about the useradd command, but how do I setup the user admin to have a directory in /home/admin or /admin ??

Also, are there some special parameters I must specify when creating my admin account so its part of any certain linux specific groups/permissions?? Thats where I am kind of hung up on, any advice would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I am running Interworx-CP on CentOS v5.0 (final)… incase that is must know informaton in regards to admin account creation…

  • Chris

Chris, just setup an ordinary account and then use “su -” to switch to root when needed. Disable root login via ssh in /etc/ssh/sshd_config

On some distros the user needs to be a member of the group “wheel” to be able to su to root, but I don’t believe that’s applicable for CentOS 5

useradd -c “Server Admin” -d /home/admin admin

passwd admin

-tsl-