basics of nobody and nogroup

Datamike · 02-08-2005, 04:18 AM

I felt it was a safe bet to put this here. When I installed the apache package to my slackware linux, I noticed that the default user and group used by the server is nobody. I was once told that this is generally a bad idea from security's point of view, but I never found out what this user is actually suppose be used for. I also found there is a group called nogroup. I tried to look around but can't find anything that would explains these. Not even my linux book.

Could anyone enlighten me?

scuzzman · 02-08-2005, 04:21 AM

nobody is an underpriviledged user made specifically to run such daemons as webservers (Apache), ircd, irc bots, etc.
nogroup is the group it is a member of, so it has write access to nothing. You also see that nobody's shell is set to /bin/false, making the account useless to anything but a daemon.

Datamike · 02-08-2005, 05:07 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by scuzzman
nobody is an underpriviledged user made specifically to run such daemons as webservers (Apache), ircd, irc bots, etc ... You also see that nobody's shell is set to /bin/false, making the account useless to anything but a daemon.

I thought this was what the daemon user account was for. My entry in the /etc/shadow for nobody looks like "nobody:*:9797:0:::::" there's actually no default shell. The daemon account has an exact same looking entry.

Any reference on the internet you know of which I could use to read about this? I couldn't really find anything other than how to's for addinhg users and such.