Lab · Linux and Red Hat (RHCSA to RHCE)
Lab: accounts for a college computer lab
The brief
An engineering college in Nagpur is setting up a Linux server for its computer lab. You create the student accounts and group, set a password policy, make a shared projects folder, give a teacher read-only access with an ACL, and let the lab assistant restart the print service with sudo, and nothing more.
Why it matters
Colleges, training institutes and offices all need the same things on day one: accounts, a password policy, a shared folder that the right people can use, and limited admin rights for helpers. These are also core RHCSA tasks.
Skills you practise
- groupadd, useradd and usermod -aG
- passwd and chage
- chown, chmod and the SGID bit
- setfacl and getfacl
- sudoers drop-in files and visudo
You need
- A RHEL 9 virtual machine (free Red Hat Developer subscription) or Rocky Linux 9 / AlmaLinux 9
- A user that can run sudo (a member of the wheel group), or the root password
What you will have at the end
A lab server with the students group, a password policy, a shared /srv/projects folder with an ACL for the teacher, and a narrow sudo rule for the lab assistant, plus commands.sh.
How it is marked (rubric, 100 points)
| Accounts and policyasha and rahul are in students; asha must change her password at first login and every 90 days. | 30 |
|---|---|
| Shared folder is right/srv/projects is root:students, mode 2770, and meena has r-x through an ACL only. | 30 |
| Least privilegeravi can restart and check cups and nothing else; the rule is in its own sudoers.d file, checked with visudo. | 25 |
| Commands written downcommands.sh lists every command in order. | 15 |
0/5 steps done
Step 1 of 5
Create the students group and two students
The group students exists, and asha and rahul are members of it.
A group lets you give the same access to many people at once. Create the group first, then the users. useradd -G puts a user in an extra (supplementary) group; each user still gets a private group of their own name. getent group students shows the group line from /etc/group: the last field lists its members.
$ getent group studentsAlso check yourself
Your notes: commands.sh
Write down each command you ran. It goes into your project summary.