On 06/18/2010 02:59 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
I am migrating a system to RHEL 5 from Tru64 Unix. I noticed that there
are a couple of users that are in the default /etc/passwd that match
existing usernames; "gopher" and "sync". Is there any reason NOT to
just delete the system accounts by those names and let the existing
users have them?
The accounts are not actually active in RHEL as far as I can see, they
are just pre-listed in /etc/passwd. I'm certainly not running a gopher
server, so I can't imaging that one would be a problem. Is there really
any reason to have a system user named "sync" (or is there anything that
is going to treat that username as "special" if I let a regular user
have it)?
It's not a stupid question at all! From what I recall, the sync account
is a holdover from very early days of computing. The sysop could log
into a serial terminal as sync and it would force the OS to write dirty
buffers to disk. I want to say I remember hearing they would do that
when the system was unstable to minimize data loss in the event of a
crash. I would assume the gopher account is there in case you wanted to
install a gopher server... I can't recall the last time I even talked
about gopher, so I suspect you won't.
No reason to migrate those accounts over from Tru64, just use the
default Linux accounts.
--
Thomas Cameron, RHCA, RHCDS, RHCVA, RHCX, CNE, MCSE, MCT
Principal Solutions Architect/Team Lead, Central & West Regions
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