On Sat, May 01, 2004 at 05:33:23PM +1000, Matt Hansen wrote:
On Sat, 2004-05-01 at 14:41, Tom 'Needs A Hat' Mitchell
wrote:
>
> I have also used it as far back as I can recall.
> Just curious what does "pwck" tell you?
I might just jump in here. I'd never used pwck before. It told me I had
a couple directories non-existent such as /var/spool/uucp and
/var/gopher for system users adm and gopher respectively. Is it fine
just to mkdir these missing dirs to satisfy pwck or should the user
accounts be deleted? I don't use uucp or gopher so I suppose that's why
the directories were never touched?
No need to make these missing dirs based on pwck. Missing is ok if
things work ok.
It is important to think about why a home dir is needed. uucp,
gopher, etc. are "pseudo" user accounts that daemon processes can run
as instead of as root (safer). i.e. These lines define a user id
(UID) and group id (GID) so cron or init can start the process not
owned by root.
The purpose of "pwck" is a quick sanity check after you add a user
and not a very smart one at that....
If 'pwck' was to tell me that /dev/null was wrong I think we would fix it.
So we are ok...
Of interest on some unixes if the login process cannot access the home
directory the login will be assigned / as a home dir. Try a "dummy"
user and change /home/dummy to /dev/null and see what breaks.
--
T o m M i t c h e l l
/dev/null the ultimate in secure storage.