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From: rg@msel.unh.edu (Roger Gonzalez)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: SysVR4 process accounting.
Keywords: SysVR4 process accounting
Message-ID: <1991Apr12.125346.22096@unhd.unh.edu>
Date: 12 Apr 91 12:53:46 GMT
References: <1991Apr3.133854@anusf.anu.edu.au> <1991Apr5.124324@anusf.anu.edu.au> <1991Apr11.161928.28750@eci386.uucp>
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In article <1991Apr11.161928.28750@eci386.uucp> woods@eci386.UUCP (Greg A. Woods) writes:
>In article <1991Apr5.124324@anusf.anu.edu.au> mbl900@anusf.anu.edu.au (Mathew BM LIM) writes:
>> PS : Does anyone have any idea of what I may break by having one UID and
>> 	several login names attached to it? Will ps break? will disk quotas break?
>> 	will my mail break? Will my sanity break?
>
>Your UNIX security will break.  I.e. you can kiss accountability good-bye!
>
>Mail may not work great, nor will anything which used getpwuid() or
>simply scans the password file for a user-id.  It will always find
>only the first one that matches.

Actually it can be useful at sites where you have accounts on multiple
machines, and they run one of the big ones like a dictatorship and
force you into having a certain userid.  Then, on your own workstation
or whatever, you can make two "accounts", one with your preferred
name, the other duplicating the account name on the other machine.
Make the uid and gid the same on both, make the password on the second
'*', and then you can do NFS from your account on the dictator, as
well as rsh-ing and the like.  Oh, it also helps to make the uid on your
personal machine the same as what the dictators assign.

joeblow:OIUW#Rkjh:123:456:Joe Blow:/home/joeblow:/bin/csh
user902634:*:123:456:Joe Blow's alter ego::/home/joeblow:/bin/csh


-Roger
-- 
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting
 than the question of whether a submarine can swim" - Edsgar W. Dijkstra 
rg@[msel|unhd].unh.edu        |  UNH Marine Systems Engineering Laboratory
r_gonzalez@unhh.bitnet        |  Durham, NH  03824-3525