10.3: Username and group name the same

10-25-2003, 02:06 PM

Did a clean install last night of 10.3 which meant creating new users obviously. I was in NetInfo Manager changing the home dirs to another partition when I noticed that a group with my name had also been created. That seems rather odd to me as this would cause a proliferation of groups as more users are added. I created a user for my roommate and it did the same thing. Below is a listing of the home dirs. You can see I changed myself back to staff and kept eleanor in the eleanor group just for kicks. It doesn't seem to affect anything so far. Just curious what others might think. Seems bad to me to be creating all these groups apparently related to only one user ( many, many groups of one ).

Code:

[klamath:/Volumes/Vinson/Users] enola% ls -l
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  13 eleanor  eleanor  442 24 Oct 22:59 eleanor
drwxr-xr-x  23 enola   staff    782 25 Oct 02:19 enola
[klamath:/Volumes/Vinson/Users] enola%

ssevenup · 10-26-2003, 05:09 PM

Apparently this is one of the many common strategies other UNIX's use for security. We are evaluating if this makes more sense than our current plan where we create groups for our various organizations. Any way you do it, it's a can of worms. It can depend on how homogeneous your environment is. There are some very large organizations out there that use this plan of a seperate group ID for each user.

--MM

10-26-2003, 05:27 PM

Interesting. I've had exposure to several unix organizations both large and small and have never seen the group ID used in such a manner. Thanks, I've learned something new!

10-25-2003, 02:06 PM	#1
enola Guest Posts: n/a	10.3: Username and group name the same Did a clean install last night of 10.3 which meant creating new users obviously. I was in NetInfo Manager changing the home dirs to another partition when I noticed that a group with my name had also been created. That seems rather odd to me as this would cause a proliferation of groups as more users are added. I created a user for my roommate and it did the same thing. Below is a listing of the home dirs. You can see I changed myself back to staff and kept eleanor in the eleanor group just for kicks. It doesn't seem to affect anything so far. Just curious what others might think. Seems bad to me to be creating all these groups apparently related to only one user ( many, many groups of one ). Code: [klamath:/Volumes/Vinson/Users] enola% ls -l total 0 drwxr-xr-x 13 eleanor eleanor 442 24 Oct 22:59 eleanor drwxr-xr-x 23 enola staff 782 25 Oct 02:19 enola [klamath:/Volumes/Vinson/Users] enola%

10-26-2003, 05:09 PM	#2
ssevenup Triple-A Player Join Date: Jan 2002 Posts: 56	One UNIX method out of many Apparently this is one of the many common strategies other UNIX's use for security. We are evaluating if this makes more sense than our current plan where we create groups for our various organizations. Any way you do it, it's a can of worms. It can depend on how homogeneous your environment is. There are some very large organizations out there that use this plan of a seperate group ID for each user. --MM Last edited by ssevenup; 10-26-2003 at 09:06 PM.

10-26-2003, 05:27 PM	#3
enola Guest Posts: n/a	Interesting. I've had exposure to several unix organizations both large and small and have never seen the group ID used in such a manner. Thanks, I've learned something new!