Simon, i think u shuold be careful as far as crond is concerned. for instance, last week i gave root user some big uid and gid and the gave another user 0 and 0 . only cron gave problems. but be sure to run cron job as the user owning the file or execuritable. cheers cheedu On Thu, 24 Aug 2000, Simon Lodal wrote:

Hello all,

next question for the experts:

Does root really need to own all important files and dirs? Does it make any (ANY) difference, if another user owns say /boot, /etc, /bin, /sbin, anything?

My intent is to split administrative tasks between different users that only have a few more privileges than any normal user. One of these tasks is to update software. So I thought if I could create a "softupd" user and group, and set this owner and group to own all these files that root usually owns. More precisely, my questions are:

- Does the system impose special treatment on files with uid/gid 0 than for other files? Is there anything the user can/can't do on a file with uid/gid 0 that is different from what he could/couldn't do with other files? - Should I assign normal uid's/gid's for the administrative accounts (above 500/100), or should I use some of the lower numbers? Is this distinction only a tradition, or does the system actually treat a lower uid/gid differently?

Thanks for any input,

Simon

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