On Tue, Dec 26, 2000 at 09:23:33PM +0000, Matthew Sackman wrote: > > Thanks for pointing out how dumb it is being a member of disk group. I was just > removing myself ( ;-) ) and noticed that in addition to the group dip (needed > to be able to use pon), there was a group dialout. What is this group doing > there? and under which circumstances would one ever need to be a member of it? pppd is setuid root as its needed to configure the network interfaces, but its permissions are 4754 root.dip, only executable by the group NOT other, so when you are a member of dip you can run pppd which then runs as root and has access to the serial device anyway. group dialout gives you read/write permission to /dev/ttyS* which you would only need if you need to dial modems yourself or connect to some sort of serial device. for example if you use minicom to dial the modem manually to an old BBS or something. or if you have a machine/device only supporting access via a serial console. -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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