"staff" group questions

dstranathandstranathan
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
1) I have noticed that some of my user's home folders have this ownership (example):



drwxrwxrwt 8 joe staff 272 11 Oct 13:44 joe



Any idea why user's home folder would have group ownership of "staff"? The users in question are not admins.



2) On a healthy system, shouldn't "staff (20)" contain only root and admin?



3) On my OS X Macs, why does the "id" command show a bunch of people in "staff (20)", but NetInfo sees only root as a "staff (20)" member? I have a conflict in terms of what "id" and NetInfo see.



4) Is there anything secret or special about staff?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    dobbydobby Posts: 797member
    1. These are not the standard permissions. They should be 755 and owner and group the same name.

    2. Staff only contains root. You manually have to add users to staff.

    3. id returns the groups for that process. It doesn't list users in the group. It only matters what netinfo tells you.

    4. On some other unix platforms staff as a different gid, 10 in solaris, i think 1 in AIX and 20 in HPUX (not sure).

    Some linuxes don't have a staff group.



    Dobby.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    dstranathandstranathan Posts: 1,717member
    Figured it out! I didn't take into account that my Macs are bound to Active Directory. Weird. I didnt realize AD would affect how OS X uses groups.



    I got this info from an Apple SE:



    Netinfo will not report them as members because they do not exist in the netinfo domain, they exist in AD.

    Since all users must exist in at-least one unix group, AD users are mapped to staff group by default.
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