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Re: [RFC] Globally creating a user and a group "root"


On Tue, 11 Nov 2003, Christopher Faylor wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 11, 2003 at 01:46:48PM +0100, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> >My idea is basically the following:
> >
> >- On all NT systems, create a user account called "root" which is
> >  member of the administrators group.
> >[snip]
> >Comments?  If we agree to do as above (or similar), I would gladly
> >appreciate, if I wouldn't have to do it alone.
>
> I have always thought that it would be a good idea to implement a 'root'
> user since so many UNIX programs rely on its availability.  Anything you
> can do to make this so will be worthwhile, even if it isn't a perfect
> solution.  IMO.

I agree.  In fact, if the user SYSTEM exists and already has appropriate
privileges, we could simply map "root" (UID 0) to SYSTEM's SID (I've been
doing this on my machine for a while now).  One problem I've encountered
with this is that a bunch of programs check for UID=18 on Cygwin (e.g.,
apache), and behave differently if that's not the case (so I had a "root"
user that couldn't switch user id's, since apache didn't even try).  This
would also depend on the order in which entries appear in /etc/passwd.

It would be a good idea to compile a list of such packages, and give a
heads-up to all maintainers before the switch happens.  The packages that
definitely have this problem are openssh, inetutils, and apache, and I'm
most likely missing some.
	Igor
-- 
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