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

Tue Sep 18 11:53:46 CEST 2012

'Twas brillig, and Liam R E Quin at 17/09/12 17:23 did gyre and gimble:
+> 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.
+
+Yup, rolling out changes to large numbers of workstations would be done
+via something like puppet these days anyway, so creating user accounts
+en-mass even if they are not shipped by default should be pretty trivial.
+
+I think that's enough consensus to drop them.
+
+Cheers
+
+Col
+
+
+-- 
+
+Colin Guthrie
+colin(at)mageia.org
+http://colin.guthr.ie/
+
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