Re: The 'users' gid: sync, games, and man

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Mon, Feb 10, 2003 at 09:37:18PM -0600, Graham Wilson wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 10, 2003 at 09:45:30AM +0200, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> > Unix systems have traditionally had a user called "sync" that has no
> > password and which runs /bin/sync on login (and then, obviously,
> > immediately exits). It was supposed to be useful when users noticed that
> 
> i assumed that is what it was for, but i attempted to log in as user
> sync, and abacadabra, i couldnt. on my system, at least, the sync user
> is configured to net let anybody log in.

You know, there's even documentation of this now, in
/usr/share/doc/base-passwd/users-and-groups.html:

sync

    The shell of user sync is /bin/sync. Thus, if its password is set to
    something easy to guess (such as ""), anyone can sync the system at
    the console even if they have no account on the system.

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]