Re: [cobalt-users] Site paths

[Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 08:09 PM 2/26/00 -0800, you wrote:

> When a user on the system is using telnet and cd..'s down past their home
> dir, how does the user know what site they are in? How would they know if
> they belong to site1, site2, site3 and so on........

From the prompt, the user could enter the command:

$ groups

which will return a lit of all the groups of which the user is a 
member.  Presumably he'd be a member of siteX where x is the number of the 
site.

> I guess they could just user the cd command to go back to their home dir and
> the pwd command to get the system path for configuring CGI and Perl scripts,
> but their must be an easier way to do this.

Telnet is definitely made for people with clue.

Because of the unix/linux permissions system, it's rare for a user (even a 
site administrator) to be able to completely destroy a system without 
intentionally wanting to do so, but s/he can certainly destroy his own 
site.  One misplaced space-bar keypress can easily do it.  With intent, 
it's pretty easy to completely destroy a system.  Especially a default, 
out-of-the-box system.

> Maybe perhaps naming the HOME
> dir the same as the username?? or is this done to restrict hackers from
> getting usernames??

I doubt it, since you can get the entire username list no matter how 
underprivileged you are, by telnetting into the system and doing (from your 
home directory):

$ cat /etc/passwd >anyfilename

and then FTPing anyfilename into your own system.

> But on the otherside if it was a hacker that knew a bit
> about the Unix O/S they would know that the users names are in the password
> file, and httpd.conf file, log files, and the list goes on and on.

as you've just noted <smile>.

> Is their a way to change the user creation process to create the user dirs
> with the same name as the user name? This is the first time I have seen this
> type of setup on a Unix system and I think it is an unnecessary step in the
> user creation process.

It's done this way to make the gui easier to write, maintain and manage.

Jeff

--
Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>