Re: nogroup and nobody
Hi Colin
On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 02:48:21PM +1000, Darren Williams wrote:
> > This has been brought up before and appears that it is not major
> > concern for the Debian community.
>
> Can you give me a reference? I don't recall ever seeing this in the
> several years I've been a member of Debian or in the year and a half
> I've been the Debian base-passwd maintainer.
>
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2001/07/msg01296.html
This ia the start of the thread, and as you can see it is on the
developers list so you may have missed it.
> > However, the current policy of nobody, nogroup subtly breaks Linux
> > Test Project if you are unaware of Debian's policy. LTP expects that
> > if user nobody exists then either a nobody group exists or it will
> > create one if you desire. The problem becomes obvious when you run LTP
> > on a network filesystem using NIS and ltp has created the group nobody
> > under the NIS flag in /etc/group. This new group is never recognised
> > and the hosting server is requested to fulfil the request, if that
> > server is also a Debian system then it to will know nothing about the
> > group nobody, and subsequent tests that rely on the group produce an
> > incorrect result for the test. For details on LSB user groups see:
> > http://www.linuxbase.org/spec/refspecs/LSB_1.3.0/gLSB/gLSB.html#TOCUSERSGROUPS
>
> This does seem to be a straightforward bug in either Debian policy (and
> base-passwd) or the LSB. Frankly I'm not sure how Debian could get there
> from here; it entirely depends on how much the name 'nogroup' is
> hardcoded in packages in our archive. I'd hope not very much, but I'm
> reluctant to agree with changing policy and base-passwd without knowing
> the impact. Has anyone audited this?
>
> Similarly, is there a good reason for the LSB to mandate that name, or
> is it just overspecification in the same way that it used to mandate
> that the bin and daemon users should have uids 1 and 2 respectively? We
> got that specification removed because there was really no good reason
> for the LSB to specify it. The LSB says that the nobody group is for
> distributions, not applications, so it seems unlikely that it would
> matter if the alternative were offered.
>
Overnight I though about the semantics of such naming and come up with
this reasoning.
If I am a 'nobody' ( which is debatable :) ) then I belong in the 'nobody'
group. So this means that I am a nobody and I also have a group.
Unlike if I am a 'nobody' (once again debatable) then I belong to the
'nogroup' group, which clearly does not correspond to the nobodies of
this world.
From the latest LSB I have this:
"
Rationale
The purpose of specifying optional users and groups
is to reduce the potential for name conflicts between
applications and distributions.
"
http://www.linuxbase.org/spec/refspecs/LSB_1.3.0/gLSB/gLSB.html#USERGRPRAT
Darren
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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Darren Williams <dsw AT gelato.unsw.edu.au>
Gelato@UNSW <www.gelato.unsw.edu.au>
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