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The concept of users is the fundamental block of ownership separation on multiuser operating systems. All Windows™ versions based on the NT kernel are such; Windows™ NT, 2000, XP, Vista are all multiuser operating systems. Other UNIX variants are also inherently multiuser, including Linux™ , BSD™ flavours, MacOSX™ , etc. Since most web servers capable of running PHP applications are based on Linux™ , we will talk about the Linux™ user system, which is in fact the same as the UNIX user system; after all, GNU/Linux is nothing but an open-source UNIX variant which became very popular among geeks and recently among other people, too.
As we mentioned, the fundamental block of ownership separation is a user . Each user has an entry in the system's password database and consists of a user name and a numeric user ID . A user is not necessarily linked to a physical person; in fact, most utilities and services create and operate under a user of their own.
The numeric user ID is an unsigned integer, therefore it can take a value between 0 and 65534. The user name and the numeric user ID are usually linked with an one to one relationship, meaning that if you know either one you can find the other one. The exception to this is most ISPs. In this case, because there are more users than the available number of user IDs, some numeric IDs will be reused, breaking the one to one relationship. However, on most - if not all - hosts, the one to one relationship exists.
Some user IDs are special. By convention, user IDs below 500 are reserved for system users. These are special users which are not assigned to some physical person. One of them, zero (0), has a very special meaning; it is assigned to the super user , commonly called root . This user is the God of the system. He has unlimited powers. He can override all access restrictions and make any kind of modification. For this reason, no sane system administrator logs in under that user. They will always log in under a normal user and only temporarily log in as root whenever they need to change system-wide settings.
Defining permissions per user is tiresome on systems which have more than a few users. In order to combat this inconvenience, all UNIX systems have the notion of groups . A group is nothing but a collection of users. The relationship to users is a many-to-many relationship, meaning that one user can belong to many groups and one group can contain many users. To keep things dead simple, groups have the same format as users. Each group has a group name and a numeric group ID . Again, not all groups are linked to a physical person; in fact there are a number of de facto group names used to control access to crucial system resources.
The numeric group ID is an unsigned integer, therefore it can take a value between 0 and 65534. The group name and group ID are linked with an one to one relationship, meaning that if you know either one you can find the other one. I am not aware of exceptions to this rule and I can't think a reason, either.
There are some special group ID's. By convention, zero (0), is assigned to the root's group. Its sole member should be root, or other users with a user ID of 0. It empowers its members to do anything they please on the system, almost like the user ID 0 does. Noticed the "almost" part? Belonging to the root group alone, without having a user ID of 0, does not give you infinite powers but it does grant you very broad access indeed!
Every user can belong to many different groups. To simplify things a little bit, every user has a so-called default group. This means that one of the groups he is a member of will be his effective group, unless otherwise specified, in all operations.
This section is a bit ahead of the rest of this chapter, I know that. The information contained here, though, clarify a lot of what will follow, so it seemed only appropriate to include it here.
Every time the system has to store the owning user and group of a system item, it does so by storing the numeric user and group IDs, not the names! The names are only used as a convenience; you can't remember that John's user ID is 637, but it's easy to remember that his user name is john. Likewise, remembering that group ID 22 controls access to the CD-ROM drive is improbable, while remembering that the group named cdrom does that is self-understood.
User IDs for a user with the same user name on different systems can be different. A user named example on system A and system B might have one user ID on system A and a completely different on system B. However, all UNIX-derived systems really know about are IDs, not names!
This is very (read: extremely) important when you transfer files from one system to another. All archive
types which store owner information (for example GNU
tar ) store
nothing but the numeric ID's. Moving these to another system and extracting them will screw up ownership and
permissions. Just because you have the user ID 567 on Host A doesn't mean that you won't end up with user ID
678 on Host B; extracting such an archive would make all your files owned by someone else, effectively
screwing up your site.