On Jan 25, 3:38 pm, fthomas <thomas.faze...@gmail.com> wrote: > What's the best way to create non login accounts on Macosx 10.5 > (Darwin 9.0.0) ? > > I want to create separate accounts for servers built by myself like > mysql, tomcat, svn... > Unfortunately there is no groupadd/useradd I'm used to use. > > Thomas
Up through Tiger, the Netinfo application allowed you to edit accounts. What it showed for server type accounts, such as sshd, mysql or nobody is that the field designating the home directory was set to /var/empty and the field designating the login shell was set to /usr/bin/false which is consistent with other versions of unix. In a few other cases, such as the lp daemon, the home is set to the specific directory where it operates, in lp's case /var/spool/cups. www, the user for apache is set to /Library/WebServer; it's login shell is still set to /usr/bin/false.
I understand that the Netinfo Manager has been deprecated in Leopard, so I'm not sure what the tool is. However, because of the requirement for backward compatibility among so many third party programs, I expect that you will find that those two values are what should ultimately be set for those two datafields for your daemon user. If you're building from packages, those packages probably come with install scripts applicable to other Unix systems. In almost all cases that require a special user to be created, you have to install with root/administrator privileges, so the daemon user can be created. It may be tedious, but I recommend you go through the install script and find out what those packages do when creating the user.
