Permissions and owners of passwd and group

[Kerry Swemmer]

Hi All,

Our Tivoli monitor is complaining that the permissions and owners of our /etc/passwd and group files are wrong, as below. Does anybody know why they would complain about these settings? What would the recommended settings be? If they are meant to stay as is, what is the argument in favour of the current settings?

Tivoli says:-
The file /etc/group has the illegal group bin as its owner.
The file /etc/passwd has the wrong file mode, -r--r--r--.
The user bin should not own the security-sensitive file /etc/group.

The settings are:-
-r--r--r-- 1 root other 1799 Sep 26 13:30 passwd
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 352 Jul 29 17:32 group

All comments are welcome.

Thanx,
Kerry.

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Kerry,

Should be:

group 444 bin/bin
passwd 444 root/root

Rgds,
Jeff

[Mel Burslan]

mine are 444 and root:sys

As long as it belongs to a restricted access group, and root ownership, you should be okay with 444 permissions

[Alex Lavrov. · Accepted solution]

I used Tivoli and I'm familiar with this issue. The permissions must be like it was said above me, and just ignore Tivoli mesasges, because they are wrong.

Contact IBM support about it, maybe they have patches for it.

Alex.