On 25/12/2007, Nick Holland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Mike Lott wrote: > > Hi list > > > > I've been wondering why system accounts from UID 28 upwards are > > prepended with an underscore, whereas UID's in the range 0 up to 27 do > > not have this. I've done a bunch of searches on Google, but come up > > with nothing as yet. > > > > Could anyone enlighten me? > > Date. :) > > http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/etc/master.passwd > > Early on, BSD and Unix defined a few system accounts (root, daemon, > operator, uucp, www ...). Later on, more accounts were added in OpenBSD > as a result of privilege separation (popa3d, sshd). > > At some point (actually, right after "sshd" was added) it was decided > that there was likely going to be conflicts between new IDs and some > existing accounts people would have on their systems already. It was > obvious that this idea of creating new users for priv separation was > going to be growing, and it is just pretty clear that someone might > have a user, "Albert F. Shulz" (afs), or already have a "ppp" user, > or similar, so they started sticking the underscore in the name to > make sure that there wouldn't be conflicts. > > Look at the size difference between the -current version of > /etc/master.passwd and the early versions (say, OpenBSD 3.0). Easy > to see where conflicts would start to occur. > > Nick. > >
Kenneth and Nick Thanks very much for the info - quite interesting :) Mike
