On Sun, Jan 08, 2017 at 12:51:45 -0700, Charles Curley wrote: > May I request you end two irritants about the Debian version. It creates > a user, "backup". That's fine, although "amanda", say, would avoid > stepping on some other user named "backup". > > The irritant is that debian makes the user's home > directory /var/backups. Something else uses that directory, and I don't > like co-mingling the two different functions. It also sets the user > shell to "/usr/sbin/nologin" rather than to bash, which is an irritant > on the way to using amanda over ssh. >
For what it's worth, the "backup" user (uid 34) -- including its home directory and login shell settings -- is actually defined on all Debian systems as part of the base-passwd package (and thus exist completely separately from the Amanda packages). See, for example: https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/users/cjwatson/base-passwd.git/tree/passwd.master https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-opersys.html#s9.2.2 (_Debian Policy Manual_ "9.2.2 UID and GID classes") I've always figured that whoever did the original Debian packaging for the Amanda software (years ago) decided it would be easier to make use of that pre-existing user rather than having to have the package installation scripts manage creation (and deletion) of a separate "amanda" user.... Interestingly, /usr/share/doc/base-passwd/users-and-groups.txt.gz doesn't seem to know what the "backup" user is for, either: backup Presumably so backup/restore responsibilities can be locally delegated to someone without full root permissions? HELP: Is that right? Amanda reportedly uses this, details? .... so I suspect that this user was "allocated" in the early mists of time for the Debian project, and since then has mostly or completely fallen out of use -- except for the use by the Amanda packages.... Nathan ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nathan Stratton Treadway - [email protected] - Mid-Atlantic region Ray Ontko & Co. - Software consulting services - http://www.ontko.com/ GPG Key: http://www.ontko.com/~nathanst/gpg_key.txt ID: 1023D/ECFB6239 Key fingerprint = 6AD8 485E 20B9 5C71 231C 0C32 15F3 ADCD ECFB 6239
