First thing to realize: my RH system has been upgraded many, many times from RH 2 back in 1996 on through today, so there may be a lot of kruft in the files I am discussing. I was perusing my /etc/group file the other day and noticed a few puzzling things that I thought the list might be able to help me understand: 1. There are entries for groups which do not have any equivalent users defined for them, nor does the group have any members; in particular I have a 'shadow' group defined that fits these criteria. What is the shadow group for? 2. What is the role of the group password? I realize that many groups do not have a password defined, but some have either an 'x' which indicates a shadowed password, or a '!', which is not mentioned in the group man page. 3. What does the '!' in the password field mean? 4. If a group has a password of 'x', but there is no entry in the shadow file for this group, is this group entry broken/an orphan with no use? For example, I have a console group with 'x' for a password, but no shadow entry for user console. Several others like this. If these do not have a shadow file entry, how are they validated? 5. Why would adding a user create a private group with a different GUID than the User ID? This seems to be a recent develpment. First users I added to my system long ago had UID and GID both equal 501,502,...,507, etc. Now newest users have UID = 508, and GID = 809, and the like. Is this Linuxconf at work? -- Tom Porter [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." -- To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject.
