IDS Forum

Permissions on /etc/group and /etc/passwd on Solar

Posted By: Jonathan Leffler
Date: Saturday, 19 July 2008, at 4:56 p.m.

This is going to sound like a silly question, but...

I need to know the permissions on /etc/passwd and /etc/group on
various Unix systems that have not been touched by the support teams
at IBM. The internal systems for Informix use an interesting system
that recreates the password file from scratch every hour or so (at
least if there's a change), so that only the registered users are
available on the machine. However, I don't know whether I can trust
the permissions on the /etc/passwd and /etc/group files to be the same
as they would have been without this intervention.

Since most other people won't be interested in this, please don't
respond to the list - just to me (at this email address, please - I
don't usually use jleffler.iiug@gmail.com for correspondence, but this
time, it is appropriate). What I'm interested in is the output of two
simple Unix commands:

uname -a; ls -l /etc/passwd /etc/group

FWIW: I've gotten hold of a number of machines, with the results as
follows. I'm interested in different results - significantly
different, primarily meaning a different owner or a different group
(see the HP-UX result - I'm especially interested in the information
for HP-UX). The 'uncontaminated' machines were not touched by IBM, so
their permissions should be standard.

-- Solaris 10
SunOS black 5.10 Generic_120011-14 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-4 Solaris
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 447 Jul 29 2007 /etc/group
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2368 Jul 17 14:55 /etc/passwd

-- MacOS X 10.4 (Tiger) -- uncontaminated
Darwin Osiris.local 8.11.0 Darwin Kernel Version 8.11.0: Wed Oct 10
18:26:00 PDT 2007; root:xnu-792.24.17~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh
powerpc
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 882 Mar 22 2005 /etc/group
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1861 Mar 22 2005 /etc/passwd

-- Intel (IA32) Linux -- uncontaminated (VMware image)
Linux ubuntu1 2.6.24-18-virtual #1 SMP Wed May 28 22:24:11 UTC 2008
i686 GNU/Linux
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 861 2008-06-17 02:33 /etc/group
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1384 2008-06-05 04:40 /etc/passwd

-- HP-UX 11.00 (ancient) - /etc/group worries me
HP-UX rp5470e7 B.11.00 U 9000/800 1195494646 unlimited-user license
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 197 Apr 23 2003 /etc/group
-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 16779 Jul 19 15:05 /etc/passwd

-- HP-UX 11.11 (not quite so ancient) - and the same worries
HP-UX steroid B.11.11 U 9000/899 1677451341 unlimited-user license
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 358 Jun 14 2007 /etc/group
-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 8918 Jul 19 15:14 /etc/passwd

-- HP-UX 11.23 IA64 - same worries
HP-UX ares B.11.23 U ia64 0460552593 unlimited-user license
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 248 Aug 17 2007 /etc/group
-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 10533 Jul 19 01:25 /etc/passwd

-- AIX 5.3 - contaminated
AIX asgard 3 5 0009BF3C4C00
-rw-r--r-- 1 root security 469 Oct 29 2007 /etc/group
-rw-r--r-- 1 root system 13081 Jul 19 15:11 /etc/passwd

--
Jonathan Leffler #include <disclaimer.h>
Email: jleffler@earthlink.net, jleffler@us.ibm.com
Guardian of DBD::Informix v2008.0513 -- http://dbi.perl.org/
"Blessed are we who can laugh at ourselves, for we shall never cease
to be amused."

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