More on the staff group
November 22nd, 2003 by admin
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p>Well, it seems that the staff group has not disappeared persay in Panther, but rather no one is in the group except root. So, there shoud be some way to go into Netinfo and put iraf back in the staff group, though I don’t know a 100% safe way to that just yet. Once I figure it out, I’ll update this entry.
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p>Update. I think I figured this all out. In fresh installs of Panther, the gid (group id) of new users that are created is 80, which corresponds to the admin group. In Jaguar and upgraded copies of Panther the gid is 20, which is staff. (The upgrade process doesn’t tamper with the Netinfo database that contains all this user/group stuff),
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p>So, all my installers probably create files that are in the group staff, group id 20, and that’s causing problems since in fresh installs of panther, because the IRAF user is not staff, because its gid is now 80 (in the group admin.)
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p>A workaround for those effected might be to simply change the gid of iraf back to 20, which can be done easily in the Netinfo manager. A much better solution would be for me to change my installers to create files that set the group to gid=80, namely admin, which contains all “administrators” in all versions of OS X.
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