[RFC] Globally creating a user and a group "root"

[Morrison, John]

Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 12, 2003 at 10:25:21AM -0000, Morrison, John wrote:
>> Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>>> On Tue, Nov 11, 2003 at 01:22:50PM -0500, Pierre A. Humblet wrote:
>>>> At 05:58 PM 11/11/2003 +0100, you wrote:
>>>>> What about generating a root group with mkgroup -l by default?
>>>>> 
>>>>>  root:S-1-5-32-544:0:
>>>>> 
>>>>> The question is then, should it *also* generate an administrators
>>>>> entry 
>>>>> 
>>>>>  Administrators:S-1-5-32-544:544:
>>>>> 
>>>>> or should it generate the "root" entry *instead* of the
>>>>> administrators entry?
>>>> 
>>>> Obviously I am for maintaining compatibility with existing
>>>> installations (544 must work), some of which still have Everybody
>>>> with gid 0 (using 0 as mapping to S-1-5-32-544 is risky).
>>> 
>>> I think we should do the affected users a favor and remove the
>>> Everyone entry from /etc/passwd and /etc/group when we find one.
>>> This should be done by a script in the base-files or base-passwd
>>> package as a regular job.
>> 
>> Part of /etc/profile? or put it in /etc/profile.d/?
> 
> Eh, no.  I was thinking about a postinstall script, which checks for
> Everyone (S-1-0-0) in /etc/passwd and /etc/group and removes these
> entries silently.  The same script could add the "root" entry to
> /etc/group. 

But then what happens if somebody messes up there /etc/[passwd|group]
and have to create it again?  Does mk[passwd|group] do the changes
automatically?

J.


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