Warning: Deleting fink created users

[slaakso]

I'd like to warn people to be careful, when deleting users created by fink (or any other user created in non-normal way)

Fink creates (when requested) additional users to the system (mysql, games etc). It puts / as their home directory.

The Users - preference panel can be used to remove users. It transfers all the files on the user's home directory to admin. It does not check what the directory is or even that the files inside it belong to the specific user. This leads to the situation that removal goes through all your mounted disks and changes ownership of every file to admin (=you). After that you cannot boot the machine since root cannot access certain files.

Only way out is to boot the machine in single user mode and manually (chown -R) change the ownership back to root.

Fink should use /dev/null as user's home directory and Apple should fix this behavior. Both have been notified.

--
Seppo

 

[kenny]

Wow! That's pretty fugly...

I guess I haven't installed anything, using Fink, yet that would require accounts creation. Does Fink give you the opportunity to change the home when it creates? If not, I suppose you could change it afterwards to a directory of your choosing, but to not warn you is very nasty behaviour. Apple's isn't much better; they should not be fiddling with permissions on anything outside of /Users without positive confirmation ("Are you sure?" and then "Are you really sure??").

Although, this does pretty clearly illustrate why running as root is generally a bad idea (I'm not faulting you, just restating the principle) - that Fink does it has always bugged me in a vauge sort of way, now I'm not sure whether I want to use Fink for anything; it seems to run as root the whole time. Not cool. There are, of course, alternatives. It's still possible to build stuff by hand like any other *nix. Often, a "./configure ; make ; sudo make install" is all that is neccessary, but Fink makes it so much easier...

Anyway, thanks for the warning.

 

[slur]

I ran NetInfo Manager to check the "home" setting of the various Fink-created users and -yep- they were all set to / for some silly reason. I used NetInfo Manager to change them all to /dev/null just in case. If I ever need to remove these users I'm going to use NetInfo Manager to do it just to be completely safe.

I hope Apple will add code to their Users panel to check for weird conditions like this. It shouldn't touch anything outside of /Users.