Re: exploring debian's users and groups

[David Schleef <ds@schleef.org>]

On Tue, Aug 07, 2001 at 01:31:38PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> 
> 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 changelogs of base-passwd or base-files.

Historically, bin was the owner of executables on the system.  The
reason for this may be lost in the mists of time.  However, when
people started sharing executables over NFS, it became a serious
security hole, which was "fixed" by using root_squash and making
the executables owned by root.

I think the conclusion these days is that if you export an NFS
partition read/write over an untrusted network, you get the
security that you deserve.

> sys:
> 	HELP: As with bin, except I don't even know what it was good for
> 	      historically.

I _think_ the same is true for sys, but for non-executable files.



dave...