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nobody

Date: 13 Jul 2005 16:26:09 GMT [email protected] (Chris Thompson) writes:

>Patches have just appeared on SunSolve purporting to "fix" the
>following:

>6202671 packaging runs scripts as nobody rather than noaccess

>This confuses me. I thought that the whole point of having nobody
>and noaccess as separate uid/gid's was so that one could run
>processes as "nobody" and protect files by setting their owner
>and/or group to "noaccess", rather than vice versa.

No, processes should never run as nobody; nobody is reserved for
NFS as the default file ownership for anonymous and non-authenticated
access.

The noaccess user is destined for users "he who runs without access"

Casper

-- 
 

Expressed in this posting are my opinions. They are in no way related to opinions held by my employer, Sun Microsystems. Statements on Sun products included here are not gospel and may be fiction rather than truth.
Date: 14 Jul 2005 20:10:29 GMT
 

In article <[email protected]>,
Casper H.S. Dik <[email protected]> wrote:
>[email protected] (Chris Thompson) writes:
>
>>Patches have just appeared on SunSolve purporting to "fix" the
>>following:
>
>>6202671 packaging runs scripts as nobody rather than noaccess
>
>>This confuses me. I thought that the whole point of having nobody
>>and noaccess as separate uid/gid's was so that one could run
>>processes as "nobody" and protect files by setting their owner
>>and/or group to "noaccess", rather than vice versa.
>
>No, processes should never run as nobody; nobody is reserved for
>NFS as the default file ownership for anonymous and non-authenticated
>access.
>
>The noaccess user is destined for users "he who runs without access"

In article <[email protected]>,
Casper H.S. Dik <[email protected]> wrote:
>[email protected] (Chris Thompson) writes:

Ah, well that's the exact opposite of what I assumed.

I have to ask whether this intention is documented anywhere. It seems
not to be well understood within Sun, or why would they ship inetd.conf
with entries like

 finger stream tcp6 nowait nobody /usr/sbin/in.fingerd in.fingerd
 fs stream tcp6 wait nobody /usr/openwin/lib/fs.auto fs

in them? And there's (p)identd which runs as "nobody" by default - didn't
that get the once-over from one Casper Dik for Solaris compatibility?

Do any Unix systems except Solaris have a "noaccess" passwd entry? Is it
a SVR4ism?

-- 
Chris Thompson
Email: cet1 [at] cam.ac.uk
Date: 14 Jul 2005 20:41:42 GMT

[email protected] (Chris Thompson) writes:

>Ah, well that's the exact opposite of what I assumed.

>I have to ask whether this intention is documented anywhere. It seems
>not to be well understood within Sun, or why would they ship inetd.conf
>with entries like

Nope.

> finger stream tcp6 nowait nobody /usr/sbin/in.fingerd in.fingerd
> fs stream tcp6 wait nobody /usr/openwin/lib/fs.auto fs

>in them? And there's (p)identd which runs as "nobody" by default - didn't
>that get the once-over from one Casper Dik for Solaris compatibility?

Hm; mine doesn't run as nobody but as sys (I only did the kernel
backend :-)

So I guess this is all a bit fuzzy; nobody for NFS existed and
it was (re|ab)used.



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