Disable system account

[joemon]

I have heard that when a system account is disabled, the service or daemon associated with this account, stops functioning....For eg. if the user nobody is disabled, apache will stop serving pages on request. I just disabled the nobody user using the command, passwd -l. But still apache is working as usual. Can any one please comment on this.

[bigtomrodney]

Have you tried restarting the apache daemon? Does it launch when you start it again?

[rituraj.goswami]

i think if you restart the apache service using the commnad
# apache2ctl restart

the browser won't be able to allow you to see webpages.why are you deleting system a/c's
security policy or what??? i suggest you use selinux.

[joemon]

Sorry, that didn't work.....
I only way in which we can prevent apache to stop serving pages on request is to delete the user nobody

[bigtomrodney]

The more I think about it, nobody is a non-interactive account so maybe disabling it isn't going to do anything...as you've confirmed!

As long as nobody's default shell is set to /bin/false it won't be able to log on interactively and noone can su to it either