What are all these default users in /etc/passwd?

vegas35 · 10-13-2007, 06:38 PM

Can anyone point me to a good resource or reference out there which will help me determine the purpose of each user which is built on my Fedora, SuSE, ubuntu, etc. distros? Some of my servers need to be secured, and I'd like to disable or userdel some accounts if they're not needed. But, how do I know which ones are needed?

Some are obvious, like sshd, while others are not so obvious, such as sync or games. Seems like I could userdel games, but I'm not sure. Same for many other accounts.

Anyone know of a good reference that identifies the purpose of all these accounts?

Thanks for any help!

win32sux · 10-13-2007, 09:03 PM

I don't have a link to a page that explains each of them (I'm sure someone else does, though), but if you do a search for files owned by those users on your system it might help you in knowing what the accounts are for and/or if they are being used at the moment. For example, if I search for files owned by "daemon", I get this:

Code:

win32sux@candystore:~$ sudo find / -user daemon 2> /dev/null
/var/spool/cron
/var/spool/cron/atjobs
/var/spool/cron/atjobs/.SEQ
/var/spool/cron/atspool
/usr/bin/at
/proc/5169
/proc/5169/task
/proc/5169/task/5169
/proc/5169/task/5169/attr
/proc/5169/attr
win32sux@candystore:~$

BMackey · 11-12-2007, 03:26 PM

Rather than userdel, it is probably best to set the shell to /bin/false for those services you aren't sure of.