Create and manage users' shells

Five new hires need login shells set up today. Create accounts for alice, ben, carla, david, and emily with bash as their interactive shell, set home directories under /home, and ensure sudo is configured for alice and ben only. Confirm each can SSH in and that profile scripts source /etc/profile correctly.

Before I send this to HR for approval, make the user environment easy to accept: show which shell each person will get, why bash is chosen for these roles, list any dotfiles that will be copied into their home, and flag any privilege or SSH key issues that would block their first-day access.

I created a new account but the user reports they can’t log in; their shell is set to /bin/false. I’m worried the account creation script applied an incorrect template or the provisioning step skipped the shell change. I don’t know whether the issue is in our useradd command, LDAP template, or an upstream directory sync. Which checks will pinpoint the source and the quickest safe fix to restore interactive access?

Over time we keep onboarding people with wrong shells, missing dotfiles, or inconsistent sudo settings, and it wastes dev time on day one. Where are we losing control in account provisioning, and what single change to our onboarding routine would eliminate most of these first-day failures?