If you have your passwords set to expire automatically on your system for security reasons, there may be times when you want an account who’s password doesn’t expire (such as if you are using a cert or if you have a program or service connecting to a low access account).
You can set up just the one account not to expire by running the following command:
passwd -x -1 <user_name>
This is great to make sure that people are not signing in and leaving their connection open. Who knows who can come over and start using that already authenticated connection?
Linux / UNIX Automatically Log BASH / TCSH / SSH Users Out After a Period of Inactivity.
This is a great way to setup accounts so that you know that the password you provided will be sure to go.
chage -d 0 {user-name}
# chage -d 0 tom
Linux: Force Users To Change Their Passwords Upon First Login.
This scares me, Microsoft could really be jerks and make block out other Operating Systems, it is bad enough that you have to buy a copy of windows with every new computer even if you don’t want it.
If you run a program which can sometimes output information in cron that information normally gets dumped to your user’s mail file. That means you would need to sign into the server to check the mail file and see the results. A better way is to have the results emailed out to you. You can do this by making a simple entry as shown below:
Adding that one line will then cause all cron output to go to the email address of [email protected].
