On 05/24/2017 04:46 AM, Thorsten Kukuk wrote:
Hi,
does somebody know why the group of /etc/ppp is dialout? It looks like a very old leftover, for pppd it doesn't seem to be needed.
To continue the cleanup of the systemusers, I would like to remove this, so that the "filesystem" package only contains directories owned by root and nothing else. This would also allow to finish the split of the system users from aaa_base.
Thorsten
Not sure if its specifically the reason but historically anything wishing to access the serial port needed to be part of the dialout group. pppd would need to be part of dialout to open a serial port so I guess they were lazy and used that group rather then creating there own. "ll /dev/ttyS*" will show you that all serial ports are still part of the dialout group, so removing it will likely break things. (I added myself back to the dialout group last week to talk to a device over a USB Serial interface with minicom). I guess you could make any application talking to a serial port Require that group but that would still leave unknown groups in /dev/ for those not using it. Swapping serial ports to use a group other then dialout would make us different to any other distro and I guess could break things. -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B