[CentOS] User creation problem

Sat Mar 15 17:59:00 UTC 2008
Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com>

On Sat, 2008-03-15 at 16:47 +0000, Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Saturday 15 March 2008 16:20, Craig White wrote:
> > /usr/share is a really bad idea...
> > - selinux
> > - goes against intended purpose
> >   http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#PURPOSE26
> > - just a plain bad idea.
> >
> > home directories should be in /home with the sole exception of daemon
> > users (uid < 500) which will typically be created in /var or /var/lib
> >
> Fair enough.  I'll delete that user and start again.  About UIDs, though.  The 
> user 'groupware' is not a user in the normal sense of the word.  It is a part 
> of dimap functionality, in my case handled by dovecot.  There will never be a 
> login, unless I have to do it as part of the setup, then switch off logins.  
> Is it best to allocate a UID above or below 500?
> 
> This may be obvious to you, but its a new ballgame to me :-)
----
FWIW...

On most networks I create a user 'administrator', a normal (500+ uid)
account with login privileges and an $HOME directory somewhere in /home
(I normally put user accounts in /home/users).

I use this user 'administrator' for a lot of purposes including...
- Windows Domain Administrator
- 'the From' email address (adminstrator at my_domain.tld) for
notifications
- 'admin' user for Horde (IMP/et. al.)
- owner of Windows related files that are somewhat restricted such as
'netlogon' share
- owner of most shares (NFS/Samba/Netatalk)
- member of 'Dom Users' group (again a Windows thing)

This may or may not be useful to you. I think that the users you create
should be uid > 500 UNLESS their only purpose is to run daemons.

Craig