2. Features

2.1 Fine grain privileges

You can distribute various administrative privileges to ordinary users. For example, you can grant the ability to manage POP (email) accounts.

2.2 Co-managers

When you edit a user account, other modules may join in the dialog layout and add various fields and validation. For example, the mailconf module inserts two sections to let you manage email related topics. So from a single place, you have access to:

• User accounts details
• Email aliases
• Vacation settings
• Disk quota settings

Co-managers may work with group accounts as well. For now, only disk quotas are supported this way.

2.3 Password synchronisation

The module sends the message "chgpasswd" to allow other modules to update of the user password in other format. The samba module does this to update the NT/SMB password.

2.4 Inter-module messaging

userconf generates several messages to help automation. Here is a list (see "linuxconf --showmsgs" to learn about all inter-module messages)

        chggroup            group
        chgpasswd           user newpassword islocked domain
        chguser             user domain
        coadminauth         pseudo-user password
        coadminpriv         pseudo-user privilege*
        delgroup            group
        deluser             user domain
        editupass           domain
        newgroup            group
        newuser             user domain
        postdelgroup        group
        postdeluser         user domain
        

2.5 Related modules

The following modules works in relation with userconf:

• accountbatch: let you maintain the account database from another database.
• diskquotaconf: Help maintain user and group disk quotas.
• ldapconf: Help maintain an openldap server. It can hyjack userconf so it manages user accounts in LDAP transparently. Using a co-manager, userconf can manage extra fields (administrator defined) in LDAP.
• mailconf: Beside configuring sendmail, it provides a co-manager to configure email settings of user accounts.
• samba: Synchronise the NT/SMB passwords and accounts.
• usersbygroup: Let you grant administrator privilege on members of specific groups (A teacher is allowed to managed user accounts of his student for example).