On Thursday, February 7, 2002, at 11:12 AM, Paul Lieberman wrote:
> This is actually a security "feature". All unix processes have to run as > one user or another. System processes generally run as the user root, > but for a process such as MySQL to run as root would be a big security > breach, so it creates a user with no privledges to run under. This user > also becomes the owner of any files that the process needs to have write > access to, adding another layer of security. > In theory you could have a single generic user account that all of > these processes run under (some Linux systems use 'nobody') but this > could get messy so it customary to have different accounts such as mail, > news, apache, mysql, etc. On most Linux systems I've ever seen, the presence of these "extra users" isn't as alarming as it is when an OS X user first encounters them in NetInfo or SysPref: Users. It's standard procedure, in fact. OS X just hides the default users that come with the system, and not the 'passwd' users -- if in fact Apple hadn't programmed OS X to hide them, you would have seen "nobody", "www", "root", and probably others the first time you ever opened up SysPref: Users. To see the full list of users on your system, you can either browse around in NetInfo Manager.app or type 'niutil -list / /users' in a Terminal window. This topic is the reason behind the discussion earlier this week of what criteria is used to hide the default users from the SysPref: Users pane, though that may have been on fink-users, not fink-beginners. If you didn't catch that thread, Finlay Dobbie suggested that users with UID < 100 don't show up in SysPref: Users. (read it here: http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/8629/25/7759987/) Hope that clarifies a bit, Erik ---- Erik Price Web Developer Temp Media Lab, H.H. Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Fink-beginners mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-beginners
