Questions[users](ubuntu)

How do I kill all processes running by my own non-root account?

I have some spinning smbd processes that I caused from my windows machine and so I telnetted into the linux server and I want to kill those spinning processes. I don't have authority to restart services or reboot the machine.

I added a user account to the admin group and discovered I added wrong user. So I now have to remove the account from the admin group.

How can I remove an account from a group without deleting the user?

I want to add the Apache user (www-data) to the audio group. I've read the man page for useradd, but I'm not having any luck. I'm running xubuntu 11.10. Here's what I'm doing:

$ sudo useradd -G audio www-data
useradd: user 'www-data' already exists

If I leave out the -G option, bash, prints the help info for useradd:

$ sudo useradd  audio www-data
Usage: useradd [options] LOGIN
Options: -b, --base-dir BASE_DIR       base directory for the home directory...

It's not clear to me from the man page what options I should use to make this work.

Just created a new virtual Ubuntu server and I'm in the process of hardening it for production use. I currently have a root account. I want to do the following:

• Create a new user (let's call them jim for the rest of this). I want them to have a /home/ directory.
• Give jim SSH access.
• Allow jim to su to root but not perform sudo operations.
• Turn off root SSH access.
• Move SSHd off to a non-standard port to help stop brute-attacks.

My problem lies with the first two items. I've already found useradd but for some reason, I can't log in as a user created with it over SSH. Do I need to beat SSHd to allow this?

I've often come across posts on forums or other websites where you see people joking in such a manner about running/logging in as root as if it's something awful and everyone ought to know about it. However, there isn't much that a search reveals on the matter.

It may be widely known to Linux experts, but I really don't know why. I remember always running as root when I first tried Linux years ago (Redhat and Mandrake) and don't remember running into any problems because of that.

There are actually some distros that have a bright red background with alert signs all over it as wallpaper for the root user (SuSe?). I still use the "Administrator" account for regular use on my Windows installation and haven't ever run into any problems there either.