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Re: Administrator vs Administrators
- From: Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>
- To: Luke Kendall <luke dot kendall at cisra dot canon dot com dot au>
- Cc: cygwin at cygwin dot com
- Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2005 01:52:02 -0400 (EDT)
- Subject: Re: Administrator vs Administrators
- References: <20050906035725.2C21483C6F@pessard.research.canon.com.au>
- Reply-to: cygwin at cygwin dot com
On Tue, 6 Sep 2005, Luke Kendall wrote:
> Our policy is that for their PC, users have administrator rights in the
> network domain, so they can install and uninstall software.
>
> I had someone report this error today from a script I'd written:
>
> On 6 Sep, Iain Templeton wrote:
> > Replacing /bin/shell.exe with newer one from //handel/d/cygnus/cisra
> > chown: `Administrators.SYSTEM': invalid user
> >
> > I think you have an extra s in the user name :-) (I have an
> > Administrator user, but no Administrators user).
>
> Can someone correct my understanding if I've got this wrong? I think
> "Administrator" means the administrator account on the local machine,
> "Administrators" means the administrative account for the machine in the
> domain (workgroup).
Nope, "Administrator" is a local user; "Administrators" is a local
*group*. Windows allows groups to act as users: own files, etc.
> (Until we added the 's' we were getting permission problems in
> installing, updating and removing Cygwin if the user had admin
> rights but wasn't the person who'd installed it.
>
> On my PC running cygwin I can execute the command properly. So I have
> no idea what's going on here!
Windows doesn't care about the names of users/groups -- it goes by SIDs.
Cygwin uses /etc/passwd to map names into SIDs. The information for the
"Administrators" group is probably missing from /etc/passwd on Iain
Templeton's machine -- "mkpasswd -g >> /etc/passwd" could fix that, though
this is supposed to be done automatically.
The cygcheck output shows that the "base-passwd" package is 1.1-1. This
is likely to be the reason for the above -- the latest is 2.2-1. I'd
update "base-files" too -- he's a full major version out of date. Did he
use a stale mirror?
> $ ls -l xxx
> -rw-r--r-- 1 luke Domain Users 8686596 Sep 2 18:00 xxx
> $ chown administrators xxx
> $ ls -l xxx
> -rw-r--r-- 1 Administrators Domain Users 8686596 Sep 2 18:00 xxx
> $ chown Administrators.SYSTEM xxx
> $ ls -l xxx
> -rw-r--r-- 1 Administrators SYSTEM 8686596 Sep 2 18:00 xxx
Heh, and here we thought "fortune" was dirty... :-)
Igor
--
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