Unit 4

This unit on creating users and groups in Linux cleared up some of my previous confusion about user permissions. For the moment, I have written down the permissions given by each number on a post-it and displayed it prominently next to my monitor.
1 = execute only
2 = write only
3 = write and execute
etc.

The text spent several pages going over the importance of encrypted passwords stored in the shadow file and the security risk posed if a user's password is easily guessed, e.g. "password." What jumped out to me was that some programs will allow the user to create a long password, but will only remember the first 8 characters. I have on occasion jumbled the last couple letters in a password and still been granted access to my account. Now I have some idea why that works, although I could not predict which programs do this or not.

In order to install Webmin this week and practice adding users using a GUI via web browser, I had to install Perl which turned into a long frustrating search for a typo.

The file I needed was libmd5-perl_2.03-1_all.deb whereas I had been been omitting the "d."