Re: Administrator vs Administrators

[Luke Kendall <luke dot kendall at cisra dot canon dot com dot au>]

On  6 Sep, Igor Pechtchanski replied to:
>  > Can someone correct my understanding if I've got this wrong?  I think 
>  > "Administrator" means the administrator account on the local machine, 
>  > "Administrators" means the administrative account for the machine in the 
>  > domain (workgroup). 
>   
>  Nope, "Administrator" is a local user; "Administrators" is a local 
>  *group*.  Windows allows groups to act as users: own files, etc. 

Ah, okay, thanks.

>  > (Until we added the 's' we were getting permission problems in 
>  > installing, updating and removing Cygwin if the user had admin 
>  > rights but wasn't the person who'd installed it. 
>  > 
>  > On my PC running cygwin I can execute the command properly.  So I have 
>  > no idea what's going on here! 
>   
>  Windows doesn't care about the names of users/groups -- it goes by SIDs. 
>  Cygwin uses /etc/passwd to map names into SIDs.  The information for the 
>  "Administrators" group is probably missing from /etc/passwd on Iain 
>  Templeton's machine -- "mkpasswd -g >> /etc/passwd" could fix that, though 
>  this is supposed to be done automatically. 

Done automatically by the base-passwd package?  Ah!  Thanks for that
info too.  As part of our post-install process, because no domain users
used to be added at all, I do

   mkpasswd -l >  /etc/passwd      # Add system accounts.
   mkpasswd -d >> /etc/passwd

So that's my fault.

I didn't know about the -g for groups, so that explains that.  So as to
not miss out on any special stuff done by setup, it looks like I need to
do something like:

   cat /etc/passwd > xxx   # Preserve any special accounts.
   mkpasswd -l >> xxx      # Add system accounts.
   mkpasswd -d >> xxx
   sort -u < xxx > /etc/passwd

>  The cygcheck output shows that the "base-passwd" package is 1.1-1.  This 
>  is likely to be the reason for the above -- the latest is 2.2-1.  I'd 
>  update "base-files" too -- he's a full major version out of date.  Did he 
>  use a stale mirror? 

In a way.  His version, from memory, is probably over a year old.  Many
people here don't like to take a risk and install the latest stuff. 
E.g.  he likes to use zsh, and it took hours of his time to discover
that its profile wouldn't source unless the user's home directory had
been created by Windows Explorer rather than Cygwin's mkdir.  Once he
got things working for his purposes, he was happy to stay with that.

[...]
> > -rw-r--r--  1 Administrators SYSTEM 8686596 Sep  2 18:00 xxx
> 
> Heh, and here we thought "fortune" was dirty... :-)

[scratches head]  Because of the "xxx"?  Anyway, thanks again Igor,

luke


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