Hi, Thanks to all who assisted me in understanding the mysteries of the Linux system. You people are a great asset to the Linux community.
Thanks again, Darcy On Thu, 2008-10-23 at 19:43 -0600, Mark Carlson wrote: > On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:06 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Hi, > > > > I have been learning on my own about file permissions in Fedora 8 recently > > and I have a few > > questions about what I saw on my computer. I was looking at my user account > > in User Manager > > under properties. I noticed that my password was five characters but not > > six that I use > > currently. My UID is 500 and login shell is /bin/bash. Another user account > > called nobody with > > UID 65534 is present with a home directory /var/lib/nfs with password of > > five characters and this > > user has it's local password is locked. Another nobody account at user ID > > 99 with login > > shell /sbin/nologin with home directory as /. > > > > I checked further into this and realized this has been like this for > > several years. I may have experimented with a user > > accounts in the past but I can not remember this. > > Don't Panic! > > >From the Debian GNU/Linux System Administrator's Manual: > http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/system-administrator/ch-sysadmin-users.html > "UID 65534 is user "nobody", an account with no rights or permissions." > > Absolute FreeBSD has this to say about the "nobody" account: > "For years, system administrators used the account "nobody" as a > generic unprivileged user. They'd run web servers, proxy servers, and > whatever else as nobody. This was better than running those programs > as root, but not as good as having separate users for each daemon. If > an intruder successfully penetrated one of these programs, he had > access to them all." > > > Any suggestions or explanation how I use six character password but only > > five is recorded in > > the User manager preferences. What's the difference between /bin/bash and > > /sbin/nologin? > > Linux doesn't know how many characters your password is until you type > it in :-) It puts 5 stars there to show that it is a password field, > and what you type in will not be shown. > > >From the man page for nologin(8) on my system: > NAME > nologin -- politely refuse a login > ... > DESCRIPTION > The nologin utility displays a message that an account is not available > and exits non-zero. It is intended as a replacement shell field for > accounts that have been disabled. > ... > > To summarize, if a user's login shell is set to /bin/bash, they see > /bin/bash when they log in the traditional way, or via SSH. If it is > set to /sbin/nologin, then they can't log in either at the machine or > remotely. This is useful for when you want a daemon such as sshd, > httpd, or cups to run and not let it touch any files it doesn't need > to. It's a bit of an abstract concept, but it is used frequently. My > system has 25 users with /sbin/nologin as their shell, and I didn't > add any of them. It's also useful in other ways, but I won't bore you > further. > > > Thanks, > > > > Darcy > > -Mark C. > > _______________________________________________ > clug-talk mailing list > [email protected] > http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca > Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) > **Please remove these lines when replying _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
