So I've installed xubuntu on an older p2 machine in my basement and i am running it without an X server and with sshd. I use puTTY to log into it from windows computers and improve my comannd line skills away from home as i am very much a novice right now.

Anyway, i am adding new users and i want the accounts to have limited privlidges. By default they do so this is good =). My problem is that when a new user uses for example nothing happens. The prompt just skips to the next line. I would like instead for a line to be printed that states access is denied. or something along those lines. I suspect the option for that is commented out in a config file somewhere.

My other problem is that the users still have access to my home directory. I would like each users directory to be kept private from other users (except for root of course).

Thanks in advance,

--Crash

P.S. if anyone has any other recomendations as to what i could install on the server be my guest. It's basicly just a toy for me right now but i plan to build on it.

As root

chmod 700 /home/your_username

should stop other users seeing your home directory. What settings does it have now?

Some distro's use a group called "users" as the default group and other's create a group by the same name as the user and make that the default user for each user. My current distro is SuSE, and it uses the "users" group. I would recommend manually creating a new group for each user and make that their default group. That is what I did.

On my system, if a user who isn't a member of the "wheel" group tries to use sudo, they get a nasty message about the incident being reported. The "%wheel" setting is in the /etc/sudoers file. There isn't anything there that I could find about the prompt displayed for unauthorized usage. You use the "visudo" as root to edit the sudoers file.

This isn't related to your questions, but since you are connecting from Windows, I would recommend installing Cygwin/X. This will give you an X server terminal and the bash shell you can use on windows as well. Then if you can use the ssh command to connect to a Linux machine, and use "ssh -X" to have a graphical program display on your windows terminal machine.

that helps a lot thank you billymayday. Also jschiwal, i will probably configure the server that way. Thanks for the advice. As far as cygwin goes i won't be using that because the server has no X which is what i prefer as it is running on 128 mb of ram (yes, xfce i know) but it wouldn't much matter anyway because i'm running puTTY off of a usb drive and connecting from different computers. Some i don't have the admin privileges to use cygwin.