CentOS – How to Create an Unprivileged User

centosinit-scriptprivilegesusers

I want to create an unprivileged user to run my RhodeCode server and Celery daemon on a CentOS instance. I think the accepted definition of this is no home directory, login disabled, and no shell access? Looking over the man page for adduser I just don't see an intuitive method for doing this. Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks.

Best Answer

From here (centos.org)

useradd (which is the actual binary the runs when you call adduser, it just behaves differently. See here about that.) has an flag -r which is documented as follows:

-r   Create a system account with a UID less than 500 and without a home directory

Which sounds like what you want to do.

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How to get rsync to complain if user not found

The rsync command doesn't have a mechanism for handling this directly, so I would use a different approach. I would scan the source filesystem tree, collecting the usernames (and groups) of all files present there:

# List of usernames owning files under 'src'
find src -printf "%u\n" | sort -u | tee /tmp/src.users

# List of group memberships for files under 'src'
find src -printf "%g\n" | sort -u | tee /tmp/src.groups

# Copy files to target system
scp -p /tmp/src.{users,groups} dest:/tmp/

I would then ensure that all users existed on the target system ready for rsync to use. Run these commands on the target system:

# List "missing" users
getent passwd | cut -d: -f1 | sort -u | comm -13 - /tmp/src.users

# List "missing" groups
getent group | cut -d: -f1 | sort -u | comm -13 - /tmp/src.groups

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