Preventing users from loggin into a unix box

On Apr 19, 17:50, Ram Meenakshisundaram wrote: whenever the system is about to shutdown. That's not what it's "supposed" to do -- it's supposed to be checked by 'login' and if it exists, cause login to refuse to accept the remote login, and print the contents (if any). Some versions of Solaris don't honour that, though :-( They just use it to contain a message given to anyone attemting to log in while a shutdwon is in progress (it's not the message printed to active sessions when a shutdown starts, though). If your system uses NIS, then you could just change the contents of the passwd line in /etc/nsswitch.conf from "passwd: files nis" to "passwd: files" and add your own entry to /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager Dept. of Computer Science University of York