Users and Groups

This week our assignments and readings focused on administration of users and groups. We had to do the same basic tasks of adding new users and groups and setting permissions using three different interfaces, Gnome, Webmim, and the CLI. It was all pretty straightforward and mostly about can you follow detailed directions. The only hiccups on the assignments I had were due to typos when using the command line interface. Once I got over my Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy moment and stopped panicking, I was able to figure out pretty quickly why things weren't working. It was usually just due to one letter being off, which is kind of frustrating but easy to fix. The umask numbering system is going to take some getting used to, but I think it is doable. I don't know that I need to understand intricately really anyways, so long as I know where to find the information and can set permissions as I need them. I actually had a harder time wrapping my head around the discussion of the set user identification attribute. I don't know why because it sounds straightforward enough, but the explanation just did not make sense to me. I am hoping it will click at some point. I think this is a situation where I really just need to understand the concepts and possibilities so I can accurately express to my IT administrator what my needs are. it is not likely that I will be setting these permissions myself, at least not at my current job.