[Mageia-dev] halt and shutdown users: Still needed?

Colin Guthrie mageia at colin.guthr.ie
Mon Sep 17 15:56:09 CEST 2012


'Twas brillig, and Johnny A. Solbu at 17/09/12 14:25 did gyre and gimble:
> On Sunday 16 September 2012 22:40, Colin Guthrie wrote:
>> I'm not sure anyone has used these user accounts
>> for the state purpose for the last decade at least.
> 
> How are they supposed to be used?

Well according to folklore (which is about all I've got to go on here),
before there were proper infrastructures in place to allow users to
reboot machines, sysadmins might give "trusted" workstation users the
passwords to these accounts which then let them "login to reboot" (I
guess a forerunner to the "Start->Shutdown" oxymoron!)


> I didn't know untill now that these accounts existed, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
> I'm also not sure that I'm ever going to use them. ;-)=

Me neither. I only saw it due to a bug report about a utility that
checks /etc/passwd for inconsistencies and highlighted that the "halt"
user could no longer access their shell /sbin/halt after I moved it to
/usr/bin.

I then found some old pages on the web regarding these accounts:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=39855
http://www.redhat.com/archives/nahant-list/2007-March/msg00168.html

That's about as much as I know. I guess my beard is not quite grey enough...


I can easily enough leave them in place and fix up the paths, I just
figure why bother when they are likely totally unused and/or trivial to
add by any sysadmin if they want that kind of functionality.

Col
-- 

Colin Guthrie
colin(at)mageia.org
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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