Hi, I'm newly registered to the site although I referenced it several times to transition from Xandros OCE; this site has been quite helpful. I was originally going with Slackware but decided Ubuntu Server would work well for my purposes. I'm like the digital picture archivist for my family so I'm running a home file/print server with ssh enabled. I have SAMBA and SSH working but I haven't set the printer up (CUPS) yet. I think I'm only slightly more than a Linux noob but I decided to go with a command line distro to force myself to learn. My first question is how can I tell which user accounts are for the system and which are created for people to log in to the system? I understand that there are accounts created for the system to do its job and I only want those accounts plus the accounts I have authorized/created. My second question is whether there a way that I can see a record of all logins (successful and attempted) to my system? I read that I can use "last" and lastb" but will this show all logins since the system was created? I saw that there was a limitation to this command but I'm not clear. I know the computer would eventually fill up if it logged and kept every entry so I guess I'm looking for something along the lines of the "history" command but for logins. I'm aware of RTFM and I have tried to read as much as possible but these issues I am uncertain of, regardless of how much reading I do. This is just a personal home server and I have changed the default SSH port but I'll follow up on any other ideas about securing it if you have any. Thanks. Mark

Most of what you need can be found in the files in /var/log. That should work.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

A simple way to find which users are for "people" is to look in /home, every user has an account there by default . Regarding the other question check /var/log/messages and /var/log/secure . You could install a firewall that has a brute force detector and keeps logs for everything like CSF firewall.