I was pondering why disto developers might have different philosophies about what seems to me to be a core issue.
For example, other distros enable the root password by default. *Ubuntu does not. I understand both sides of this issue and happen to side with Canonical on this one - logging in as root has resulted in less-than-optimum results in my experience.
However, I can't seem to glean a reason for assigning each user a unique group and then allowing group access by default. It just seems more logical to me to have all users assigned the same primary group ("users" anyone?) and then use a default umask that leaves a user's files/folders un-readable to all. This seems more in-line with system standards.
For example, I use a created group called "share" for users I wish to have access to my server media files. I add all my users to that group. I have to set the GID sticky bit on the shared folders to "share" so that any files added are accessible to other users. It would have been simpler to just make the media folders GID "users." Then, all files added would automatically be accessible to all. I suppose if I wanted to build sub folders of files shared by some but not all, I'd have to use the GID sticky bit anyway.
Can anyone shed light on why Ubuntu handles user account this way instead of the other? Is the intent that I might add one user to another user's primary group so that I a user could have complete access to all files of that user?
Anyway: I realize this is easily re-configured after install, this is linux after all. I just wondered what others thought on the topic.
For example, other distros enable the root password by default. *Ubuntu does not. I understand both sides of this issue and happen to side with Canonical on this one - logging in as root has resulted in less-than-optimum results in my experience.
However, I can't seem to glean a reason for assigning each user a unique group and then allowing group access by default. It just seems more logical to me to have all users assigned the same primary group ("users" anyone?) and then use a default umask that leaves a user's files/folders un-readable to all. This seems more in-line with system standards.
For example, I use a created group called "share" for users I wish to have access to my server media files. I add all my users to that group. I have to set the GID sticky bit on the shared folders to "share" so that any files added are accessible to other users. It would have been simpler to just make the media folders GID "users." Then, all files added would automatically be accessible to all. I suppose if I wanted to build sub folders of files shared by some but not all, I'd have to use the GID sticky bit anyway.
Can anyone shed light on why Ubuntu handles user account this way instead of the other? Is the intent that I might add one user to another user's primary group so that I a user could have complete access to all files of that user?
Anyway: I realize this is easily re-configured after install, this is linux after all. I just wondered what others thought on the topic.
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