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

Mon Sep 17 18:23:25 CEST 2012

On Mon, 2012-09-17 at 14:56 +0100, Colin Guthrie wrote:
+> 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!)
+
+Yes - I seem to remember that V7 and also 4.1, 4.2 BSD shipped with
+several such pseudo-users, although they may've been a local addition at
+the university where I used them in the early 1980s.
+
+They are good for environments with users you don't trust but who have
+to be able to do specific admin tasks... but they could for sure be
+added locally in those environments.
+
+Of course, if you have a university with 5,000 workstations, it'd be
+nice not to have to make changes to each of them... but, it's likely
+that changes are already made, and if one of them is to enable NIS then
+you can add the pseudo-users globally anyway.
+
+Every account is a potential break-in vector, however unlikely, so it
+seems better not to ship with them.
+
+Liam
+
+-- 
+Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
+Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
+Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
+
+