Duplicate GUID in /etc/group

[Stuart Green]

Can someone explain why there are duplicate GUID assignments in /etc/group
On all my machines checked so far I have:

mem:*:3:
kmem:*:3:

lp:*:12:
lpr:*:12:

I only came across this when running a security auditing tool. And need to explain to the author why this is.
This appears the default setup. But why?
Thanks

[Ann Majeske]

My first comment is that you should find a better security auditing tool, one that was written with understanding of UNIX and the history of UNIX rather than just running a set of rote rules. The existance of these GID pairs is NOT a security problem.

The mem/kmem and lp/lpr group name pairs exist due to historical reasons. Tru64 UNIX is based on both BSD and SysV versions of UNIX and contains elements from each of them. For each of these group name pairs, one of the names is from the BSD heritage and the other is from the SysV heritage. In both cases they are two names for the same function, not different functions. Since they are the same function it would cause serious problems if you changed the GID for one of the names. Deleting one of the names would likely cause problems for any third party applications that depend on that name. Deleting either GID completely would likely cause problems for the base operating system and/or third party applications. HP will not support deleting or changing any of these group entries.

[Ravi_8]

Hi,

even i my machines, mem,kmem and lp,lpr has the same gid. The Tru64 was designed like that. changing their GUID will affect the system.