Public SourceMage Discussion List

["Jeremy Blosser (emrys)" <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>]

On Jan 09, Sergey A. Lipnevich [sergey AT sourcemage.org] wrote:
> David Kowis wrote:
> > tracked and automatically removed. In my own twisted little mind, if 
> > they're automatically added then they should be automatically removed 
> > when they're no longer in use. For example: I install postgresql, the 
> > user postgres is created, I didn't know that this user is created, but 
> > nonetheless it's there. After dispelling postgresql, because I decided 
> > that mysql is a better venue for the software I'm working on/with, the 
> > postgres user remains on the system. What I'm proposing is that the 
> > users get tracked somehow. If a spell needs the user it's added, upon 
> > compile or resurrect. If the spell has that user and it is dispelled, 
> > then the user should also vanish, unless, of course, it's being used 
> > by another spell.
> For development and debugging this might be a good idea (I'm not sure), 
> but in production it's out of the question that existing account is 
> automatically deleted. I believe that no production system would survive 
> even an internal audit if such a functionality is in use. For an account 
> to be deleted, one would have to ensure that, at the minimum, no files 
> are owned by it, and no log ever mention it, and this is already too 
> much to ask from a packaging system.

I agree.  Automatically removing users violates some fundamental sysadmin
practices.  To the other subthread, no, there isn't a difference between
system and user accounts where this issue is concerned.

There is a bug about this somewhere on bugzilla, but I can't find it at the
moment.  The last word I think was that any such feature would need to be
optional.

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