TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

6420 discussions

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!

16 years

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

16 years

/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

16 years

[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

16 years

AncientFS ported to Linux and FreeBSD

by Warren Toomey

Guys, Amit wrote in: http://www.osxbook.com/blog/2008/12/22/ancientfs-on-linux-and-freebsd/ By popular demand, I've "ported" AncientFS to Linux and FreeBSD. Cheers & Merry Xmas to you all, Warren

16 years, 1 month

Old UNIX Filesystems with FUSE

by Warren Toomey

http://osxbook.com/software/ancientfs/ Amit Singh has added support for a whole bunch of early UNIX filesystem and archive formats to FUSE. Cheers, Warren

16 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Old UNIX Systems with netb (was Filesystems with FUSE)

by Norman Wilson

John Cowan: "Cannot yet" is good. Is there any hope of seeing the 10th Edition emerge from the shadows, ever? ======= Unless some energetic person skilled at nudging people in a friendly way takes on the cause, probably not. Even were Novell to release the source code to System V, that wouldn't of itself make 10/e open, since there's plenty in the latter system that differs substantially from the former--all the really interesting bits, in fact. As has been discussed here at some point in the past, someone would have to get (updated list of players) Novell, AT&T, and Alcatel all to agree to the release. The good news is that that would probably mostly require getting Novell to agree that there's nothing in the system worth protecting for commercial reasons, and the others just to officially say what is already likely true, that they don't care. The bad news is that that is probably substantial work, as he who talked what was then SCO into a hobbyist-source-license for 7/e and predecessors knows well. But Warren has already gone far beyond the call in his work (and cannot be thanked enough, so herewith I thank him yet again); and I'm old and tired and was never really good at talking to corporate types anyway; and in my humble but correct opinion, it is the combination of energy and dedication and ability to talk cheerfully to corporate times and to persist without losing either hope or patience or cordiality that is needed. That has always been a rare combination. If someone thinks he or she has the requisite skills and wants to have a go, I'll be glad to offer what little help I can, and I'm sure Warren likewise. But somehow I wonder whether it will actually happen before the world ends on 2038 January 18. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

16 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Old UNIX Filesystems with FUSE

by Norman Wilson

John Cowan: > Does this depend heavily on OS X, or should it work on Linux and BSD as well? Warren Krun Toomey: No idea. I had a brief look at some of the code on the web site and it seems relatively neutral, but I have not downloaded it yet. I've sent an e-mail with the same question to Amit. ====== I keep meaning to poke about at FUSE, since it plays more or less the role of the file-server-implementation library setup I wrote for my own purposes 20 years ago (in the context of a UNIX variant that cannot yet be distributed freely). But I'd be surprised if the stuff was terribly MacOS X dependent. Certainly FUSE exists in Linux, and the libraries and requisite kernel module are even included in some Linux distributions (notably recent editions of Fedora), because sshfs is built atop FUSE. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

16 years, 1 month

/usr/bin/bs on HPUX?

by Jose R. Valverde

Bit of digging: > 1. "bs" was written at AT&T, probably at the Labs, at some time between > the release of 32V and System III. It was part of both System III and > at least some System V releases. And of course it is in TUHS! Remember we have 32V and SIII. For example, look into TUHS/Other/Distributions/Plexis_Sys3/ or TUHS/PDP-11/Distributions/usdl/SysIII/ The sources contain 'bs' under cmd/bs The latter one (under USDL) contains also the man page under usr/src/man/man1 (as 'bs.1'). So, there. You have it. This leads me to consider we would greatly benefit from an expanded and indexed TUHS repository tree. I made one on my mirror long ago, but a series of disk crashes ended with it. Maybe, if there is interest I could do it again. j -- EMBnet/CNB Scientific Computing Service Solving all your computer needs for Scientific Research. http://bioportal.cnb.csic.es http://www.es.embnet.org

16 years, 1 month

[pups] PDP-11 / vacuum tube interface

by Ross Tucker

Dear all, (This has got to be the strangest cross-post I've ever done.) I have just taken a bet from a friend to challenge my geekiness. I was telling him about my love of Vintage Technology and he proposed that I combine two hitherto separate hobbies and see what happens. The topics: the DEC PDP-11 minicomputer (vintage: 1970s) and vacuum-tube ham radios (vintage: 1960s). I do sincerely apologize for cross-posting, but I am rather younger than either of these technologies (vintage: 1984) and this seems like a monumental challenge. My question for y'all: how could I possibly design+build a project that uses both of these technologies? My thought is to port some radio receiver Digital Signal Processing (DSP) application into PDP-11 assembler, compile and run it via emulator on my PC, then use it with the vacuum-tube regenerative receiver that I built a few years ago... Does anybody know if PDP-11 UNIXes even had the capability for a "sound card"? Or, to get ambitious, I would LOVE to design some interface circuitry between PDP-11 digital circuitry and vacuum-tube electronics... The challenges are legion: the tube side of the circuit operates around 350V DC levels with radio-frequency (RF) signals at 7 MHz (almost the clock rate of some PDP-11s!) and I don't have the DEC Handbooks, but I'm pretty sure that even those ancient pre-TTL circuits operate below 350V! So... any, er, "ideas"? Best regards, Ross Tucker

16 years, 1 month

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