User-id into /etc/passwd

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Fr, den 16.04.2004 schrieb Paolo Consiglio um 13:16:
> Hi everybody,
> I was looking into Fedora and I see a lot of user-id defined into
> /etc/passwd file,
> such as ftp, usr, and so on. It's seems to me they don't have access to
> shell,
> but I wonder if  that could be a problem for internet security...
> Maybe can I delete them and leave only root and the standard users
> without having any kind of problem?
> 
> thanks for answering, bye! P.
> 

Do not delete any of them!

They are for security reasons. Example: The ftp daemon is running as
user ftp, file access for this user is limited. If you were to delete
ftp and choose root to run ftpd THIS would be a massive security whole,
for root has "access to all areas" ;-)

Christoph