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Re: NetBSD and User Private Groups (Unique Groups)



On 29/01/2020 13:20, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
On Wed, Jan 29, 2020 at 11:29:54AM +0000, Ottavio Caruso wrote:
On 29/01/2020 10:02, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
On Wed, Jan 29, 2020 at 09:36:02AM +0000, Ottavio Caruso wrote:
Hi,

I'm using 9.0_RC1, so I don't know if this is a functionality that was used
in the past and then dropped or will be introduced in the future.

At one point in time, probably around 10+ years ago, Red Hat introduced User
Private Groups [1]. I ignore if other OSes have had this feature before
(probably Mac OSX ?). Anyway, this has then spread to all other major Linux
distros. FreeBSD calls them "unique groups" [2]. OpenBSD has this line in
/etc/usermgmt.conf:

group           =uid

I never understood how this would be usefull


[I forgot to cc: the list. Manuel, sorry for the duplicate]

I wonder how this can possibly _not_ be useful.

On a multi user system, all files are created readable by the group (umask
022). If we are all in the same group, anybody can read my newly created
files (imagine a local password file for alpine or ssl certs for irc, etc).
It's then left to the user to change umask and/or adjust permissions. Why
not just make it easier for the user?

Note that it's also readable by others (with umask 022, the files are
created rw-r--r--), so changing the group won't help.


It's a valid point. I had manually set my umask to 066 and I assumed this had anything to do with group setup. Sorry for the noise.

And, replying to Martin, I agree that a global umask would be the best solution. This would however open a can of worms, as one would have to agree on which umask to use, then edit all configuration files for all shells (including the ones installed from pkgsrc) and make sure that updates do not touch these files, unless there's a simpler solution that I'm obviously missing.

(And, yes, I understand _I_ have opened a can of worms by asking this question...)

--
Ottavio Caruso



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