System Administration Tasks

System administration can commonly be separated into two wide categories: supporting users and supporting systems.

Supporting Users

Users are the customers. The network would be a one computer, without them probably running a frivolous application like Doom and generating no business or creating no new sales.

Creating User Accounts The most fundamental thing that an administrator can do for a user is to create an account. A Unix accounts are contained in the /etc or passwd file with the actual encrypted password being contained in either the passwd file or the /etc/shadow file if the system implements shadow passwords.