We have two standard Debian GNU scripts to perform user management.

1. adduser

First, adduser, does the usual job, and executes /usr/local/sbin/adduser.local. There we log new account creation to our special log file, and set up group quotas. We can't set up quotas by defining the appropriate variable in /etc/adduser.conf because that works for user quotas only, and not group quotas. What a shame.

2. deluser

The tool to delete users is deluser. What's wrong with deluser is that it can remove user's files at deletion time, and it can also back them up before that. You can specify backup directory, but it goes tar-gzipping the files, which can take a long time. I need to hack the source to allow files to just be moved to the backup directory. This way, if you keep backup dir on the same partition as /home, moving user's files is instant and doesn't grow linearly with user directory size.

CategorySystemAdministration