>I've got one other thing bugging me right now.  On the old system
>there was a terminal / curses maintenance tool that I used for adding
>users.  It was capable of more than that, but I never got around to
>using any of the additional functionality.  I _thought_ it was called
>linuxconf, but I can't find any hint that a program by that name ever
>existed in Debian.  Any idea what it was actually called?

Linuxconf is a tool that was commonly used and available to various
distributions.
I don't think it's used much anymore. It's basically an interface to the
system configuration files so all that additional functionality is still
there, it's just not available through that one interface.
Depending on your distribution, there may be a similar packaged tool
available such as webmin or yast.
If you really want to get to know your system, you can edit the
configuration files directly or use command line tools such as useradd.