Re: Hearing the truth??

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Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 18:11:13 +0000
To: "OBrien, Brennan" <BOBrien@columbia.com>

OBrien, Brennan wrote:

>All:
>
>I've got an interesting situation at the office I could use some advice
>on. I'm being asked from a security perspective whether the following
>statement (made by our Unix admins) could be considered true:
>
>"The only way you can delete a user account on a unix environment is to
>write a series of scripts to eliminate file associations."
>
>So, while I don't disagree with the logic, is this actually the case
>that there are no commercial tools available to assist in this arena,
>and the only method of deleting a user on a system safely and
>effectively is to write a bunch of scripts on your own? This just begs
>to be a problem solved by a commercial entity if it's actually the case.
>
>
>We're in a Sun environment. Some thoughts would be appreciated.
>
>Brennan
>
>
>

That's dumb.
Any user can be deleted with the command "userdel username", if you want
to remove the home dir use "userdel -r username", this will remove the
dir in /export/home/username (if in the default location), it isn't a
good idea to do userdel -r to a user that have a shared or system home dir.

Any file owned by that user will stay as it was.

The only detail is that the owner of any file will stay the same, as
when you ls -l the file you'll see a numeric user ID instead of the
owner's login name. And if later it is created another user with the
same UID that user will own those files.

In any case if you want to do something to files from a certain user you
can do

    *find / -user <username> -exec do_something_to_file {} \;*

or

    *find / -user <UID> -exec do_something_to_file {} \;* #
    (if the user was already removed)

That's not a bunch of scripts, my guess is that you need new unix admins...

-- 
António  Vasconcelos
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• Previous message: Sayek, Ogan: "RE: Hearing the truth??"
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