[Again trimmed the to/cc list. ]
I just looked into the book "Unix System Administration" written by
Æleen Frisch (Published by O'Reilly). So here's the information that I
found in this book about some of the groups and users, which I
translate, since the book is the german version.
On 01-08-07 Joey Hess wrote:
> root:
> Root is (typically) the superuser.
Normally you should have only 1 superuser, but there are some rare
cases, where it might be nice to have more the one. :)
> daemon:
> Some unprivileged daemons that need to be able to write to some
> files on disk run as daemon.daemon (portmap, atd, probably others).
> Daemons that don't need to own any files can run as nobody.nogroup
> instead, and more complex or security conscious daemons run as
> dedicated users.
This user should be used to execute server-process on the system. This
users exist only as the owner of the process and the files belonging to
the process. Also it assures that the process is run with the
appropriate access permissions.
This group is the traditional owner of the Spool-Directory /usr/spool,
altough the actual owner of /var/spool may vary from system to system.
> bin:
> HELP: No files on my system are owned by user or group bin. What
> good are they? Historically they were probably the owners of
> binaries in /bin? It is not mentioned in the FHS, debian
> policy, or the changelog of base-passwd or base-files.
He owns typically the executable files of the user commands.
> sys:
> HELP: As with bin, except I don't even know what it was good for
> historically.
The user normally owns the system files. And on System V this group
owns the various system files as well as the special device files, which
belong to the group kmem on BSD.
> adm:
> HELP: On my system, use of group adm is confined entirely to
> /var/log, and I've never seen the point. Oh, and
> /dev/xconsole is owned by group adm, but that may be a
> (local?) bogosity.
According to the book I mentioned above, there's only a user called
"adm" who owns the Accounting files. Often there are a lot of accounting
and system files saved in the home-directory of this user.
> tty:
> Tty devices are owned by this group. This is used by write and wall
> to enable them to write to other people's tty's.
That group noften owns all device files, which are connected with
terminals. They control the access to the terminals, so that programm
like write allow the users the communication with each other, while not
writing directly to the terminal.
> kmem:
>
> /dev/kmem and similar files are readably by this group. This is
> mostly a BSD relic, but any programs that need direct read access
> to the system's memory can thus be made sgid kmem.
This special group owns some system programs which need direct memory
access, for example ps and pstat.
> staff:
> HELP: So, /usr/local and /var/local are owned by it, but how's it
> differ from say, adm, and what's the historical meaning, and
> the current purpose?
Like user used as standard group bei various Unices.
Christian
--
Debian Developer (http://www.debian.org)
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