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RE: How can I set up users?


Despite your style, thank you for your reply.  I've been able to piece
together several bits of information and make things work.

For the general public:

Read the security section in the user's guide.  It's not intuitive, but you
can figure out what's going on pretty well.

The complete answer to my question was that a user was required in
/etc/passwd.  To find this user's ID, I had to use 'ls -ln' on some files I
owned, then copy the Administrator line, change the ID from 500 to my own
(400) and the pw_gecos field to "my_domain\my_user_ID".

A related issue is that some program can't use '/' as a home directory and
fail to create things under it.  Changing the home directory in the passwd
file helps, but doesn't actually make any difference.  To set your $HOME and
put you in the right directory, you have to include the statement 'set
HOME=<whatever>' in your Windows BAT files.  This only works with login
shells, though.  To get around this, I created a .bashrc file, with the 'cd'
command in it.

Sionara,
Gal


-----Original Message-----
From: Elfyn McBratney [mailto:elfyn-cygwin@exposure.org.uk]
Sent: Friday, 24 January 2003 2:49 PM
To: cygwin; Baras, Gal
Subject: Re: How can I set up users?


> I've bumped into various problems (cron, mail, etc) that seem to have a
> common theme with respect to user setup.  However, there are no commands
to
> manage users (useradd, etc) and the password file handling is unusual.

No. There is no *nix like utility distributed with cygwin for managing
users. There is, as always, the `net' utility distributed with all versions
of windows (well 9x and beyond ;-) which can be used to add users to the
system.

> I'm logging on to my (W2K) workstation as a domain user, with no
> corresponding local user defined.  When I use Cygwin, my home directory is
/
> and I have all the privileges in the world (I'm in the Administrators
group
> for the domain), but all my file permissions and settings have my user ID
on
> them (crontab, mailbox, etc).

Really? That's no good. What do you expect? Files created by you are going
to have your name on 'em because they're your files. Wrt "all the privileges
in the world" you may find that is because you haven't set-up restrictive
permissions on the hard disk(s)? Windows defaults with very open and
un-secure permissions where everyone have global read/write privileges.

> Is there a clear explanation somewhere about how users are treated under
> Cygwin?

Yes! There's the user manual and the faq all of which can be found on the
cygwin site:

<http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/cygwin-ug-net.html>
<http://cygwin.com/faq/>

Regards,

Elfyn McBratney
elfyn@exposure.org.uk
www.exposure.org.uk






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