[2201] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Fwd: A question about how groups get handled
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Apr 5 09:07:01 2000
Message-Id: <200004041959.PAA00040@small-gods.mit.edu>
To: Tim McGovern <tjm@MIT.EDU>
Cc: release-team@MIT.EDU, grouper@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 04 Apr 2000 15:13:43 EDT."
<v04020a05b50fea9add06@[18.152.1.21]>
Date: Tue, 04 Apr 2000 15:59:15 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
> 1. If the /etc/groups file comes from Hesiod's list, is there any
> way to predict what order _that_ list is in, or if Moira determines
> the order, what is _that_?
moira determines the order. I'll let a moira person answer this
question, since I don't know for sure.
> BTW, do I infer correctly that the order may be quite unpredictable
> depending on what's already in the file on the machine?
Yes, the group list resulting from a login may be quite unpredictable
depending on what's already in the file on the machine.
> 2. We understand that the /etc/groups file controls access to NFS
> servers. Otherwise, the file seems to contain pretty random and
> useless entries for most people. What else uses the file? Is there
> some UNIX dependency on the file that isn't normally visible?
/etc/group (no "s", incidentally") is used to determine your group
list, which is stored in the kernel (you can look at it with the "id"
command) and is used not only for NFS but to access files on the local
disk. For most people, this isn't practically interesting, but you
could concievably set up an area on the local disk of a workstation
which is only accessible to Athena users in a certain group.
> Oh, and speaking of visible or not, is there a clear definition of
> what it means for a list to be "visible" vs. "hidden"?
I'll let a moira person answer this question.
