[NCLUG] Why one group per user and SGID home dirs

Sean Reifschneider jafo at tummy.com
Thu Feb 22 13:29:40 MST 2001


On Wed, Feb 21, 2001 at 09:02:42AM -0700, Mike Loseke wrote:
> Giving each user a group with his name may have been done to cater to
>those new to *nix so as to not confuse them. That's the only reason I can

It can certainly cause problems on servers.  If you have one group per user,
and things get confused with more than one user being associated with a
group (usually mistakes by admins less familiar with Unix)...  You then
delete the user with "userdel", and it won't delete the group.  You then
try to add that user back in and it will barf because the group already
exists.

Just switched a customer's box to doing a single group ID per user last
week because of that.

Sean
-- 
 The geek shall inherit the earth.
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python



More information about the NCLUG mailing list