Ubuntu – How to enable or disable a user

users

I'm uing ubuntu 12.04 desktop. I have 3 users: user1(administrator), user2(standard) and guest. I wanted to disable user1 and enable user2 which auto logs on with no password but after I did that I can't login to user1 and user2 accounts except the guest session user. I'm striped off every administrative privileges. I don't know which options are available to me and how do I enable root or user which is an administrator?

Best Answer

Expire Account

Let the account expire to disallowing a user from logging in from any source including ssh:

# disallow peter from logging in
sudo usermod --expiredate 1 peter

This is how you can reenable that account:

# set expiration date of peter to Never
sudo usermod --expiredate "" peter

Lock a Password

To disable / lock the password of user account use below command. This will not disallow ssh-access on Ubuntu. This prepends a ! to the password hash so that no password will match it anymore.

# take away peters password
sudo passwd -l peter

To unlock him:

# give peter back his password
sudo passwd -u peter

Expire a Password

This command seems to differ across platforms. On Ubuntu, expiring a password will command the user to make up a new one once he logs in. This is not suitable for disabling an account.

# make peter think of a new password on login
sudo passwd -e  YYYY-MM-DD peter
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