From: cowan@ccil.org (John Cowan)
Subject: [TUHS] historical users and groups
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2009 12:36:41 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20090114173641.GC22276@mercury.ccil.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <72C06F9F-BBDB-4473-9091-7131B7FFD073@tfeb.org>
Tim Bradshaw scripsit:
> Wheel was people who could su, and I think that su knew about the
> wheel group. Or maybe it just knew about GID 0? Was wheel always GID
> 0? I have an unreliable memory that it was wheel because it was
> round, like 0.
Interesting etymology, but like most such things, false. Thus spake
the Jargon File:
wheel: n.
[from slang "big wheel" for a powerful person] A person who has an
active wheel bit. "We need to find a wheel to unwedge the hung tape
drives." (See wedged, sense 1.) The traditional name of security
group zero in BSD (to which the major system-internal users like root
belong) is "wheel". Some vendors have expanded on this usage,
modifying Unix so that only members of group "wheel" can go root.
wheel bit: n.
A privilege bit that allows the possessor to perform some restricted
operation on a timesharing system, such as read or write any file
on the system regardless of protections, change or look at any
address in the running monitor, crash or reload the system, and
kill or create jobs and user accounts. The term was invented on
the TENEX operating system, and carried over to TOPS-20, XEROX-IFS,
and others. The state of being in a privileged logon is sometimes
called wheel mode. This term entered the Unix culture from TWENEX
in the mid-1980s and has been gaining popularity there (esp. at
university sites). See also root.
wheel wars: n.
[Stanford University] A period in larval stage during which student
hackers hassle each other by attempting to log each other out of
the system, delete each other's files, and otherwise wreak havoc,
usually at the expense of the lesser users.
--
My corporate data's a mess! John Cowan
It's all semi-structured, no less. http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
But I'll be carefree cowan at ccil.org
Using XSLT
On an XML DBMS.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2009-01-14 17:36 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 8+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2009-01-14 0:59 Jeremy C. Reed
2009-01-14 13:00 ` Jose R. Valverde
2009-01-15 17:15 ` Jason Stevens
2009-01-16 5:52 ` Angus Robinson
2009-01-14 13:33 ` Jose R. Valverde
2009-01-14 17:15 ` Tim Bradshaw
2009-01-14 17:36 ` John Cowan [this message]
[not found] <mailman.1.1231898401.13466.tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
2009-01-14 7:28 ` Robert Harker
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