Strange ownership issues

[Rick Stevens]

Jay Shampur wrote:
> I've recently installed a Red Hat ES3 Update5 on a Compaq Proliant
> box.  There are only two accounts defined at the moment: darryl and
> mysql.
> 
> I logged in as root, unzipped a tarball in /root folder, and this
> tarball uncompressed into a folder. So far, so good.  The wierd part
> is that this new folder - which did not exist prior me uncompressing -
> has the owner darryl group darryl.
> 
> I know I did not su into this account or otherwise - also various
> folders which were created when I installed Apache 1.3.33 from source
> and other software, have their ownership set to various other groups
> such as mysql, games etc.,
> 
> I have not found any pattern in this - can anyone help?

Keep in mind that the user names and group names shown in "ls" listings
are for your benefit.  The system doesn't store names in the ownerships,
it stores the UID and GID (user and group numeric ID) values.  "ls", by
default, tries to match the numeric UID or GID to the /etc/passwd or
/etc/group file.  If there's a match, the corresponding name is displayed.

All this means is that the tarball was created by someone on another
machine whose UID matches the UID of user "darryl" on your box.  Do an
"ls -n" on the new folder, then compare those UIDs and GIDs to your
/etc/passwd file and you'll find that they match.

By default, RHEL starts creating new users using UID 100 and GID 100
and increments them as each user is added.  This is controlled by the
file /etc/defaults/useradd.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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