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   <H1>[Mageia-dev] halt and shutdown users: Still needed?</H1>
    <B>Colin Guthrie</B> 
    <A HREF="mailto:mageia-dev%40mageia.org?Subject=Re%3A%20%5BMageia-dev%5D%20halt%20and%20shutdown%20users%3A%20Still%20needed%3F&In-Reply-To=%3C50572BF9.7040207%40colin.guthr.ie%3E"
       TITLE="[Mageia-dev] halt and shutdown users: Still needed?">mageia at colin.guthr.ie
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    <I>Mon Sep 17 15:56:09 CEST 2012</I>
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<PRE>'Twas brillig, and Johnny A. Solbu at 17/09/12 14:25 did gyre and gimble:
&gt;<i> On Sunday 16 September 2012 22:40, Colin Guthrie wrote:
</I>&gt;&gt;<i> I'm not sure anyone has used these user accounts
</I>&gt;&gt;<i> for the state purpose for the last decade at least.
</I>&gt;<i> 
</I>&gt;<i> How are they supposed to be used?
</I>
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 &quot;trusted&quot; workstation users the
passwords to these accounts which then let them &quot;login to reboot&quot; (I
guess a forerunner to the &quot;Start-&gt;Shutdown&quot; oxymoron!)


&gt;<i> I didn't know untill now that these accounts existed, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
</I>&gt;<i> I'm also not sure that I'm ever going to use them. ;-)=
</I>
Me neither. I only saw it due to a bug report about a utility that
checks /etc/passwd for inconsistencies and highlighted that the &quot;halt&quot;
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:

<A HREF="http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=39855">http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=39855</A>
<A HREF="http://www.redhat.com/archives/nahant-list/2007-March/msg00168.html">http://www.redhat.com/archives/nahant-list/2007-March/msg00168.html</A>

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
<A HREF="http://colin.guthr.ie/">http://colin.guthr.ie/</A>

Day Job:
  Tribalogic Limited <A HREF="http://www.tribalogic.net/">http://www.tribalogic.net/</A>
Open Source:
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</PRE>


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