USERS(7) Miscellaneous Information Manual USERS(7)

usersstandard user account names

A standard NetBSD installation has the following user account names:

The super-user, uid 0, with the highest administrative privileges. Normally not used for login directly, only via su(1) or equivalent by users in the group; see groups(7).

Secondary groups: , , , operator, , , .

Like root, this is the super-user with uid 0, but with no secondary group memberships.

Historically, root had a login shell of /bin/csh while toor had a login shell of /bin/sh. However, today both default to /bin/sh. This user account name is not used for anything in NetBSD; it is purely a convenience for actual users.

Historic user for general daemonic activity.

Owner of /var/msgs; see msgs(1). Used only by rpcbind(8), with the -s flag.

Historic user. Unused in modern NetBSD.
Historic user. Unused in modern NetBSD.
Owner of high-score files and other shared files for games.
Pseudo-user for use by the postfix(1) mail transfer agent.
Pseudo-user for use by the named(8) DNS nameserver daemon.
Pseudo-user for use by the ntpd(8) network time protocol daemon.
Pseudo-user for use by the sshd(8) secure shell daemon.
Pseudo-user for use by the pflogd(8) log daemon with the pf(4) packet filter.
Pseudo-user for use by the rwhod(8) system status daemon.
Pseudo-user for use by the ftp-proxy(8) and tftp-proxy(8) proxy daemons with packet filters such as pf(4) or ipnat(4).
Pseudo-user for use by the timedc(8) tool to communicate with the timed(8) time server daemon.
Pseudo-user for use by the sdpd(8) Bluetooth service discovery protocol daemon.
Pseudo-user for use by the httpd(8) (bozohttpd) web server.
Pseudo-user for use by the mdnsd(8) multicast DNS and DNS service discovery daemon.
Pseudo-user for use by atf(7) automatic tests that request to run unprivileged. Default value for the ‘unprivileged-user’ configuration variable; see tests(7).
Pseudo-user for use by the tcpdump(8) network traffic dumper and analyzer.
Pseudo-user for use by the tcsd(8) ‘Trusted Computing’ daemon TPM to manage a TPM.
Pseudo-user for use by the dhcpcd(8) DHCP Client Daemon.
Pseudo-user for use by the rtadvd(8) IPv6 network router advertisement daemon.
Pseudo-user for the unbound(8) recursive DNS resolver.
Pseudo-user for the nsd(8) authoritative DNS nameserver.
Pseudo-user for use by historic UUCP software, available now in pkgsrc(7).
Traditional pseudo-user used for dropping privileges. Modern practice is to assign to each different daemon its own separate pseudo-user account and group so that if one daemon is compromised it does not compromise all the other daemons.

All new standard NetBSD pseudo-user account names should begin with an underscore ‘_’ to distinguish them from accounts that real users might add, and should have a primary group of the same name; real users should accordingly avoid such account names.

groups(7)

April 2, 2020 NetBSD 10.99