[Mageia-dev] halt and shutdown users: Still needed?

Mon Sep 17 15:56:09 CEST 2012

'Twas brillig, and Johnny A. Solbu at 17/09/12 14:25 did gyre and gimble:
+> On Sunday 16 September 2012 22:40, Colin Guthrie wrote:
+>> I'm not sure anyone has used these user accounts
+>> for the state purpose for the last decade at least.
+> 
+> How are they supposed to be used?
+
+Well according to folklore (which is about all I've got to go on here),
+before there were proper infrastructures in place to allow users to
+reboot machines, sysadmins might give "trusted" workstation users the
+passwords to these accounts which then let them "login to reboot" (I
+guess a forerunner to the "Start->Shutdown" oxymoron!)
+
+
+> I didn't know untill now that these accounts existed, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
+> I'm also not sure that I'm ever going to use them. ;-)=
+
+Me neither. I only saw it due to a bug report about a utility that
+checks /etc/passwd for inconsistencies and highlighted that the "halt"
+user could no longer access their shell /sbin/halt after I moved it to
+/usr/bin.
+
+I then found some old pages on the web regarding these accounts:
+
+http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=39855
+http://www.redhat.com/archives/nahant-list/2007-March/msg00168.html
+
+That's about as much as I know. I guess my beard is not quite grey enough...
+
+
+I can easily enough leave them in place and fix up the paths, I just
+figure why bother when they are likely totally unused and/or trivial to
+add by any sysadmin if they want that kind of functionality.
+
+Col
+-- 
+
+Colin Guthrie
+colin(at)mageia.org
+http://colin.guthr.ie/
+
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+  Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/
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+