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Re: nouser/nogroup clarification



On Mon, 20 Jul 1998, Philip Hands wrote:

> Lars Wirzenius <liw@iki.fi> wrote:
> > Philip Hands:
> > > Is nogroup guaranteed never to own any files ?
> > 
> > The Policy manual does not guarantee it, but it's the only reason for
> > the group (and the corresponding user) to exist in the first place.
> > Actually, the Policy manual doesn't even mention nogroup.
> > 
> > A change to the policy manual might be good to document this, so perhaps
> > those who are on debian-policy could suggest something along the following
> > lines:
> > 
> > 	3.2 Users and groups 
> > 	
> > 	...
> > 	
> > 	65534:
> > 	      User `nobody' or group `nogroup'. No files should be
> > 	      owned by this user or group.
> 
> This seems reasonable.

I'm not sure if I agree.  I maintain the http server, wn, for
debian.  At startup, it switches to user nobody.  If this policy
is adopted, it could not write to its log file.

I could modify the source code so it switches to another user,
maybe www-data or a new user just for wn.  This may result in a
proliferation of new users.

The other option is to force use of syslog.

-- 
Jean Pierre



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