Making a Daemon User
 

I am trying to make a user to run a Daemon. The problem each time I try to switch the user it seems to fail, but if I use nobody it works fine.

I made the new user just using adduser, but is there something else I need to do?


Road

Daemon users (i.e. special accounts) should have UIDs above 100 (I think).

Please descibe exacley what you are trying to do,
what program you trying to run, what you are t ying to accomplish. It maybe you taking the wrong approch.

If I'm not mistaken a deomon just sit' in the background
and waits for some the wake it up.

I am running coldfusion on a redhat 7.2 apache box. The coldfusion daemon currently runs under nobody.

The problem is if I try and use coldfusion (CFfile command) to do file manipulation on the linux box I get an error. I can get arround this error by setting the directory and I am tyring to modify owners to user nobody and group nobody.

Now this makes me nervous using nobody and I would rather make my own user in hopes to be more secure. I woule also use this user to have FTP rights so I can modify my website with FTP. I would rather use SSH(FTP) but dreamweaver does not support that.


I could get around some of this, if I could make a directory with multiple owners. All the security text I have read says not to give anybody access to wirte to files except the owner, is it possible to have 2 onwers to a file?

Road

Hi!
Well, I don't know anything about coldfusion, but I can help you with the owners.

Well, to make more than one user own a file, you'd have to make a group, and then let all the users that you want to own the file become members of that group. For example

I want the file foo.file thats currently owned by nobody to be owned by the users bob, and pete.

groupadd foo

chown bob:foo foo.file
(that means, make the owners the user bob, and all members of the group foo)

chmod 770 foo.file
(that means, the owner has rwx permissions, and all members of the file's group has rwx permissions, and everyone else has no permissions)

edit /etc/group with your favourite editor, add bob and pete after the last ':' of the group foo (which should be at the bottom).

Good Luck!
RefriedBean