On Sat, May 01, 2004 at 05:33:23PM +1000, Matt Hansen wrote: > On Sat, 2004-05-01 at 14:41, Tom 'Needs A Hat' Mitchell wrote: > > > > > I have also used it as far back as I can recall. > > Just curious what does "pwck" tell you? > > I might just jump in here. I'd never used pwck before. It told me I had > a couple directories non-existent such as /var/spool/uucp and > /var/gopher for system users adm and gopher respectively. Is it fine > just to mkdir these missing dirs to satisfy pwck or should the user > accounts be deleted? I don't use uucp or gopher so I suppose that's why > the directories were never touched? No need to make these missing dirs based on pwck. Missing is ok if things work ok. It is important to think about why a home dir is needed. uucp, gopher, etc. are "pseudo" user accounts that daemon processes can run as instead of as root (safer). i.e. These lines define a user id (UID) and group id (GID) so cron or init can start the process not owned by root. The purpose of "pwck" is a quick sanity check after you add a user and not a very smart one at that.... If 'pwck' was to tell me that /dev/null was wrong I think we would fix it. So we are ok... Of interest on some unixes if the login process cannot access the home directory the login will be assigned / as a home dir. Try a "dummy" user and change /home/dummy to /dev/null and see what breaks. -- T o m M i t c h e l l /dev/null the ultimate in secure storage.
