Renaming a User

John Cornelius jc at hangarpilot.net
Thu Jun 19 17:13:30 UTC 2008


Craig White wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 11:44 -0400, Thom Paine wrote:
>   
>> I was wondering if it's possible to quickly and easily switch a
>> username on a samba controlled domain. I have a user who got married
>> and I need to change her login from sgillies to scampbell. Is there a
>> quick way I could do this, or do I need to create a new user and then
>> copy her data over? I've been reading, but I can't find anything to
>> clearly tell me if I can or not.
>>
>> This in on a Windows XP network with a Samba DC.
>>     
> ----
> sure but you'd have to change...
>
> /etc/passwd (or wherever user accounts are stored)
> /etc/shadow (or wherever user passwords are stored)
> the users $HOME directory
> smbpasswd (or tdbpassdb or wherever samba user accounts/passwords are
> stored)
>
> If you were using LDAP, you'd probably already understand this and could
> make the changes.
>
> I wouldn't recommend doing any of that...a user account is a user
> account and they should just continue to use the same login.
>
> If you create a new account and try to 'move' stuff, you are gonna have
> to use the profile migration tool from Microsoft to move the users
> 'profile' to the new account.
>
> Craig
>   
User names on Fedora are changed in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow. You may 
or may not want to rename her home directory. Samba may also require 
changes depending on how it's configured.

In Windows you can change the user name without changing the profile or 
anything else. If it's active directory you do it on the server by 
editing the account in the user administration tool. On XP you do it in 
the (other) user account tool from the control panel.

LDAP would be the right way to do it but.......

People get married all the time so it's fairly trivial and shouldn't 
effect the operation since on all 3 environments the user name is just a 
label but the user is identified by a numeric user id that you will not 
change.

John Cornelius




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