TUHS January 2009

tuhs@tuhs.org

12 participants
6 discussions

by norman＠nose.cita.utoronto.ca

I've assembled some notes from old manuals and other sources on the formats used for on-disk file systems through the Seventh Edition: http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~norman/old-unix/old-fs.html Additional notes, comments on style, and whatnot are welcome. (It may be sensible to send anything in the last two categories directly to me, rather than to the whole list.)

2 years, 7 months

32V, 3BSD and 4.0BSD on VAX-11/780

by nao

Hi, I successfully made SIMH VAX-11/780 emulator run 32V, 3BSD and 4.0BSD. Details are on my web site (thogh rather tarse): http://zazie.tom-yam.or.jp/starunix/ Enjoy! Naoki Hamada nao(a)tom-yam.or.jp

8 years, 10 months

historical users and groups

by Jeremy C. Reed

Trying to understand some users and groups that continue to exist on BSD systems. Can someone please point me to references or share examples of historical and/or recent uses of the following users and groups? Also any clarifications of my understandings below would be appreciated. (My context is BSD. I know some of these may have different old and existing uses on other systems.) daemon user I see /var/msgs on NetBSD is owned by daemon. msgs will abort if doing -c (cleanup) if not root or daemon user. I guess that is historic. I don't see any daemon user usage. operator user I understand that historically, the operator user had logins for those doing disk backups (via its login group privileges). I understand the operator group, just wondering if any recent uses of operator user. bin user Don't know what uses it. daemon group I understand that historically, these are for processes needing less privileges than the wheel group. Also historically, programs using /var/spool directories were setgid daemon. Anything common other than LPD/LPR still use the daemon group? sys group I understand that historically, the sys group was used for access to the kernel (/sys?) sources. (I don't know if that was just read or was for writing too.) Anyone still use "sys" group? (I guess this is like wsrc which sometimes I manually setup and use for writing to src directories.) bin group I understand that historically, used as the group for system binaries, but commonly the wheel group is used instead. Some third-party software, like OpenOffice.org, install files owned by the bin group. staff group How would this differ from wheel or operators? Any recent systems actually have default use of this? guest group Any recent systems actually have default use of this? nobody group versus nogroup group What is the significance of having both of these groups? Thanks!

15 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] historical users and groups

by Robert Harker

My knowledge comes from my early days at Sun in 84-85 as a rock-n-roll roadie turned into a UNIX sysadmin. It was passed to me as I was learning how to take care of trade show Sun Workstations. So take it with a grain of salt. > daemon user daemon was for daemon processes that ran in the background but did not want to run as root. I believe it was used by inetd when it spawned a process but an not sure. It was also used by sendmail when it gave up its SUID root privileges. > operator user operator was a normal user that had privilege to read the raw file systems through group membership. Sysadmins who did backups would also be a member of this group. The group I recall in the early days was "kmem" although now there is a separate group "disk". > bin user A user to go with group bin. Typically would be the "proper" owner of all the binaries and libraries on a system. It has lingered on for far to long because, IMHO, the vendors had no clue as to why everything was owned by bin and just kept it that way since "thats the way it's always been". > bin group I was told that group bin came from UCB to allow semi-trusted staff to replace binaries in the file system without giving them the root password. > staff group My recollection is that staff was for group read/write permissions for home directories, separate from group wheel which granted extra privileges > nobody group versus nogroup group The nobody group was a group to go with the nobody user introduced with NFS. nogroup may have been someone's attempt to make the name more obvious, or it may have been for non-privileged account. But the second case weakens the protection of a non-privileged account

15 years, 11 months

/usr/bin/bs on HPUX?

by Lord Doomicus

I was poking around an HP UX system at work today, and noticed a command I've never noticed before ... /usr/bin/bs. I'm sure it's been there for a long time, even though I've been an HPUX admin for more than a decade, sometimes I'm just blind ... but anyway .... I tried to search on google ... it looks like only HPUX, AIX, and Maybe AU/X has it. Seems to be some kind of pseudo BASIC like interpreter. Anyone ever use it for anything? Has anyone even noticed it before? I'll have to boot my Crimson to see if IRIX has it. - Derrik Derrik Walker v2.0, RHCE lorddoomicus(a)mac.com http://www.doomd.net "There's nothing nice about Steve Jobs and there's nothing evil about Bill Gates." -- Chuck Peddle, MOS 6502 Chip Designer

15 years, 11 months

[pups] 2.11BSD Patch 446+447; fixes for ulrem,umount,tar,tcsh,ps,vmstat,apropos,pstat,rk

by Walter F. Mueller

A note to all 2.11bsd users: Over the past 2 years several bug fixes for 2.11BSD accumulated, and over xmas break I finally found the time to communicate them to Steven Schultz. Steven was so kind to package them into two new patch files 446 issued December 27, 2008 447 issued December 31, 2008 Together, the patches address the following points - ulrem.s: the unsigned long modulo operator (%) was broken in libkern - umount: returned inverted exit codes (1 for success, 0 for failure) - tar: core dumped when a whole /usr tree was archived - tcsh: the time buildin function printed some erroneous or zero statistics - ps: core dumped when '-t' option was used with no further argument - apropos: core dumped when 2 or more arguments were given - vmstat: wrong normalization for some fields - several issues around the rk disk driver - no rk root attach function - no rk BOOTDEV support - incorrect UCB_METER code (vmstat/iostat never showed any rk activity) - autoconfig left the RK11 controller in an error state - pstat: added additional options to access more kernel data structures - new -c option, dumping the coremap - new -m option, dumping the ub_map (UNIBUS map) - new -b option, dumping the buffer pool table - change -s output, gives now full table dump - adapt the info's displayed by -T - some documentation corrections (vmstat, pstat, tcsh) Note: In case you wonder, as I did, why 211BSD survived 20 years with a broken unsigned long % operator: - only the non-FPP libkern implementation was affected - the kernel simply doesn't have any unsigned long modulo's :) - apparently only standalone mkfs after patch 434 was compromised For the full story of all the above consult the header of the patch files. The patch files are available from moe.2bsd.com and ftp.wx.gd-ais.com. Note, that Steven changed the packaging some time ago, the patches are now packed in bzip'ed tarballs in groups of ten patches. So you'll have to look into ftp://moe.2bsd.com/pub/2.11BSD/440-447.tar.bz2 ftp://ftp.wx.gd-ais.com/pub/2.11BSD/440-447.tar.bz2 With best regards, Walter Mueller

15 years, 11 months

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TUHS January 2009