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Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2005 01:52:02 -0400 (EDT)
From: Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha AT cs DOT nyu DOT edu>
Reply-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
To: Luke Kendall <luke DOT kendall AT cisra DOT canon DOT com DOT au>
cc: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Administrator vs Administrators
In-Reply-To: <20050906035725.2C21483C6F@pessard.research.canon.com.au>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.63.0509060138150.504@slinky.cs.nyu.edu>
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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update "base-files" too -- he's a full major version out of date.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
--
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
      |\      _,,,---,,_		pechtcha AT cs DOT nyu DOT edu
ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_		igor AT watson DOT ibm DOT com
     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		Igor Pechtchanski, Ph.D.
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

If there's any real truth it's that the entire multidimensional infinity
of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. /DA

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