You can set password expiry etc for individual users

To check status of a userspassword

chage -l username

To set it to never expire

chage -I -1 -m 0 -M 99999 -E -1 username

or type

chage username 

and set

1. Minimum Password Age to 0
2. Maximum Password Age to 99999
3. Password Inactive to -1
4. Account Expiration Date to -1

via the Interactive mode command:

I had to setup permissions for a different user to access a /home directory

way this was done was setting permissions to /home/user

user:group

Setup permissions to

chmod 770 to/user/group

Setup the group as the owner of the directory

chgrp group /home/user

set sticky bit to group and recursivelly to all directories under

find /home/user -type d -exec chmod g+s {} +

To check the status of a password

# passwd –S username

If its unlocked it looks like this

If its locked it looks like this

To unlock it Use

# passwd –u unsername

To set the password (remember do this as root)

# passwd username

If you get any warnings about password not secure enough you can ignore them. It will allow you to set the passwords.

You can test the password by exiting out of root and trying

$ su – username