Security Basics mailing list archives

Re: debian system users delete or change access


From: Alexander Klimov <alserkli () inbox ru>
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 09:47:40 +0300 (IDT)

On Thu, 18 Aug 2005, Brent Clark wrote:
I have the following in my /etc/passwd file.

daemon:x:1:1:daemon:/usr/sbin:/bin/sh
[...]

Ive always wondered, can I delete these users / groups, or maybe change
the shell access to /bin/false instead.

It would be a bad idea to delete users, since when you will not be
able to run services which use them (some startup script which do,
e.g., `su lp ...' will fail), or you will have numbers instead of
names in your `ls' output.

AFAIK changing shell would be pointless: locked users can not log in
(not even thru ssh) so their shells are never used anyway.

-- 
Regards,
ASK


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