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

[Mike Loseke]

Thus spake Sean Reifschneider:
> On Tue, Feb 20, 2001 at 05:22:29PM -0700, Matt Taggart wrote:
> >They also work on a project together, in /project. They have another group, 
> >which they both belong to, and all the files in /project use that GID. There 
> 
> Why is having your home directory sgid better than having the /project
> directory sgid?  It feels to me like it would be better to have the shared
> location sgid than having everyone's home directories sgid...  At least
> that's the way I do it.

 I've always looked at the methodology of naming groups with the user name
with raised eyebrow and curled lip.  I first saw it with RedHat (Mother's
Day release I think) and my first thought was "Ummm... huh?". Going one
step further and doing sgid stuff to home directories causes a growl to
be emitted. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

 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
think of anyway. Adding sgid to a user's home dir just promotes lazy and
sloppy users. /home/user is for 'user' and him only. Nobody else needs to
be writing files in there. This should be used in project dirs where that
sort of behaviour is desired and/or required but not across the board,
IMO.


-- 
   Mike Loseke    | If at first you don't succeed,
 mike at verinet.com | increase the amperage.