Removing account.

[Ronit_1]

I want to remove these pseudo account,uucp, lp, nnucp, sys, hpdb and www. These are login that are not associated with individual users and not have true interactive shell.

But i am not sure what issue they can cause. Can somebody tell me why these account are used for.

[Anshumali]

Ronit,

Here it is.

http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1120494&admit=109447626+1197611977301+28353475

Cheers!
Anshu

[Steven Schweda]

> I want to remove these pseudo account [...]

WHY? Do they cause itching? Pain? What?

Before you remove any of these, you might
see what they own. For example:

find / /stand /var /usr /opt /home -xdev -user lp
[...]


Perhaps you'll never want to use a printer or
a Web server, and you'll never try to install
any software product or patch which expects
to use these names, but why take the chance?

[Kapil Jha]

Why do you want to remove these user when nobody can login through them???
They are deafult user of unix.
I think deleting them would create some problems in accessing files and executables ,they are used to give some permission to files and directory.
I would not delete them for sure.
Hope this help !!!
BR,
Kapil

[Anshumali]

For me it was when Auditors demanded the accounts to be deleted. I managed to convince them that i have disabled the account. I have seen auditors where they aren't technical persons but more of a process following, documentation based specialist who will want all works to be done as per their guideline putting the technical limitations at bay.
There were many things which they demanded and i had to politely say no as my Server and applications demanded them to be present. Alternatives were found sometimes and mutually agreed to be implemented. That did require a through impact analysis and documenting what has been done on servers to avoid any issues when i am not offering my services for current organization.

Just implementing what auditors ask for, on your system may not be a good idea till you understand what could be the outcomes of that and others are you ready to tackle them in your absence.

cheers!
Anshu

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I assume that you never want to print anything; otherwise feel free to delete lp.

hpdb is only needed if you are running the old HP database, allbase. nuucp and uucp can be safely deleted.

I would definitely keep lp and sys. www is a dummy user typically used to own httpd processes. Normally, you do not want httpd to be running with the effective UID of a prividgled user (e.g. root).