suspending login

[albi at scii.nl]

On Tue, 05 Apr 2005 18:42:08 -0400
Bob Ababurko <ababurko at adelphia.net> wrote:

hi,

> I am trying to figure out how to suspend a login for a user.  Do I
> have  to do this with password aging or is there an easier(read brute
> force)  way to disallow a user from logging in?

do you want to directly disable a login for a certain user ?

- become root (or use sudo)
- with vipw replace the password-bit by a *

as you can here e.g. :

_pflogd:*:64:64::0:0:pflogd privsep user:/var/empty:/usr/sbin/nologin
pop:*:68:6::0:0:Post Office Owner:/nonexistent:/usr/sbin/nologin
^^^^^^^
the password-part is between the first and second colon

if you want to use your favorite editor (e.g. nano) instead of vi with
vipw, do the following before starting vipw, assuming bash is your
default shell : 
export EDITOR=nano