Who Is Allowed to Be Here?

Start with the ReadMe

The ReadMe on the desktop is the most important thing on the machine. Open it before you touch anything else.

A large share of your points come from simply doing what it tells you to do. It will name services this machine has to keep running, settings it wants applied, and sometimes it asks for something outright. Those are free points, and people miss them because they went straight to hunting for problems instead of reading the instructions.

The two lists

The part you will come back to most is the account list:

 ┌────────────────────────────────────────────┐
 │ AUTHORIZED ADMINISTRATORS                  │
 │   these accounts exist AND have admin      │
 ├────────────────────────────────────────────┤
 │ AUTHORIZED USERS                           │
 │   these accounts exist, but must NOT       │
 │   be administrators                        │
 └────────────────────────────────────────────┘
        anything not named above
                  │
                  ▼
          should not be here

There is no such thing as a suspicious username. There is only a name that is not on that list.

Three questions per account

Three different problems, three different fixes. Mixing them up is the most common way to lose points.

💡 The trap is the middle row. An account that should exist but should not be an Administrator is the easiest penalty on the board. The instinct is to delete the person. The correct move is to take away the privilege and leave the account alone.

Seeing the accounts

You do not need a clever command for this. The machine has a settings panel:

Settings  →  Users

That shows every normal account and whether it is a Standard user or an Administrator, which is exactly the comparison the ReadMe is asking for. You will also do most of your account fixes right here.

Behind that panel is a plain text file called /etc/passwd with one line per account. You will open it in a later unit, because a couple of accounts do not show up in the panel.

Try it yourself

Open the ReadMe and the Users panel side by side, and answer one question:

Which accounts on this machine are Administrators, and does the ReadMe agree?

Write down every difference, in both directions. Do not change anything yet.