is /dev/null a vaild Home Directory??
Tom 'Needs A Hat' Mitchell
mitch48 at sbcglobal.net
Sat May 1 09:27:00 UTC 2004
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.
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