[vox-tech] Re: [lox-tech] Migration from UNIX to Redhat

[Troy Arnold]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2003 at 09:55:35AM -0700, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 16, 2003 at 09:49:49AM -0700, ME wrote:
> > 
> > You won't want to copy the *system* usernames/groups and their associated
> > uid/gid though -- just the users on the system.
> 
> Not that I foresee myself doing something like this any time soon, but I'm
> curious...
> 
> What's the best way to determine what are "system" usernames and groups?
> 
> I'm guessing under Linux that there's a _fairly_ well-defined standard
> that one can just look up in a book, ask here, or do a Google search for.
> 
> But there are so many weird permutations of "Unix" out there, that I bet
> there's stuff that a newbie like me wouldn't recognize.

In general, the low UID's ( <100 ) are system "users"

For extra software the distro's I've used are similar wrt user names, but
there's a lot of variation.  In many cases, it's whoever packages up the
software that makes up the name for the user.  For instance, for Apache I've
seen 'apache','www','www-data' and 'httpd' as usernames. 

Of course, you said "system" with quotes, so that may not encompass stuff like
apache.

> Somewhat-related, anyone got a good pointer to a web-page that explains
> "wheel", what it's for, and where it came from?

	From the Jargon file:
	  wheel bit n. 
	  A privilege bit that allows the possessor to perform some
	  restricted operation on a timesharing system, such as read or
	  write any file on the system regardless of protections, change
	  or look at any address in the running monitor, crash or reload
	  the system, and kill or create jobs and user accounts. The term
	  was invented on the TENEX operating system, and carried
	  over to TOPS-20, XEROX-IFS, and others. The state of
	  being in a privileged logon is sometimes called `wheel mode'.
	  This term entered the Unix culture from TWENEX in the
	  mid-1980s and has been gaining popularity there (esp. at
	  university sites)

I was curious too, but google groups (q="wheel group origin") had the answer.
For anyone who doesn't know yet, Groups is generally better than google web
search for that type of question.

-troy