This guide provides detailed explanations, practical tips, and recommended tools and practices for the remote management of Linux users and groups.
Managing Linux users and groups starts by understanding what a user is – an individual who has access to the system. A user can be a standard or privileged user.
A group, meanwhile, is essentially a collection of user accounts with the same permissions. Groups provide a practical way to implement Role-Based Access Control, or RBAC, which assigns a group of users access to the same resources and permissions based on their role. For instance, you can have groups like “accounts,” “developers,” or “managers.”
Within Linux, there are two distinct types of users: system users and regular users. Regular users don’t have sudo or root access, which grants elevated privileges. In every Linux system, there is a root account, which functions as the administrator account with unrestricted privileges. On the other hand, a sudo account offers limited administrative access, and these users are typically listed in the /etc/sudoers file.
