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Shellpref The shellpref setting stores the list of available shells, in order of preference. If you add or remove a shell, you need to correct this. Defaultshell The defaultshell setting contains, as you might guess, the default user shell. Defaultgroup The defaultgroup entry is a little different. FreeBSD assigns a unique group to each user. For example, when you add the user mwlucas, it tries to create a group mwlucas (which allows greater flexibility when assigning permissions). To have every user be a member of a particular group, put the name of the group here; otherwise, leave this set to USER. Defaultclass The defaultclass line controls what login.conf (see /etc/login.conf) class that adduser assigns by default. You can leave this empty, or assign a class from those you have previously configured in /etc/login.conf. Uid_start Finally, the uid_start variable determines the user ID (UID) number that adduser will begin with; the default is 1000. You might want to change this number to match UIDs across multiple operating systems; various Linux distributions start with different UID numbers, for example. But if UID synchronization isn’t important to you, don’t worry about this setting. /etc/crontab The crontab file controls the FreeBSD job scheduler, cron, which allows the administrator to have the system run a command at any time. Each user has a separate crontab file, which can be edited with crontab -e. The /etc/crontab file is the system’s file. Unlike user crontabs, /etc/crontab lets the sysadmin specify which user will run a job. For example, the sysadmin can basically say, “Run this job at 10 PM Tuesdays as root, and run this other job at 7 AM every day as nobody.” Other users can only run jobs as themselves. Note The /etc/crontab file is considered a FreeBSD system file. Be careful not to overwrite this file when you upgrade (see Chapter 6). One way to simplify upgrading /etc/crontab is to set your custom entries at the end of the file, marked off with a few lines of hash marks (#). Environment Statements The /etc/crontab file begins with some environment statements because cron needs to set up a shell environment for the programs it starts. If you’re familiar with shell programming, you can alter these statements to fit your system, but be careful when making blanket changes because changes made at the top of /etc/crontab affect all programs run from the crontab. (You can specify environment variables on the command line for each command you run from cron.) 188

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