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.
