GROUPS(7) | Miscellaneous Information Manual | GROUPS(7)

# NAME

`groups` — standard group names

# DESCRIPTION

A standard NetBSD installation has the following user group names:

wheel
  Users authorized to elevate themselves to the super-user privileges of the root user, meaning uid 0. Normally the wheel group has gid 0.

  Users who are not in the group wheel are never allowed by su(1) to gain root privileges.

daemon
  Used by the set-group-id (setuid(7)) programs lpq(1), lpr(1), and lprm(1).
sys
  Historic group. Unused in modern NetBSD.
tty
  Used by the set-group-id (setuid(7)) programs wall(1) and write(1) to allow users to send messages to another tty even if they don't own it. Static tty device nodes in /dev are all in the group tty, and the mount_ptyfs(8) program passes the gid of the tty group to the kernel so that all nodes in /dev/pts or equivalent are in the group too.
operator
  Users authorized to take backups of disk devices and shut down the machine.

  The disk device nodes in /dev such as /dev/rwd0a are in the group operator and group-readable so users in the group can read from disk devices, for example with dump(8). The tape device nodes in /dev such as /dev/rst0 are in the group operator and are both group-readable and group-writable so users in the group can write to tape devices.

  The shutdown(8) program is executable only by root and members of the operator group.

mail
  Historic group. Unused in modern NetBSD.
bin
  Historic group. Unused in modern NetBSD.
wsrc
  Historic group. Unused in modern NetBSD.
maildrop
  Used by the set-group-id (setuid(7)) programs postdrop(1) and postqueue(1) to submit to and examine the postfix(1) mail queue at /var/spool/postfix/maildrop and /var/spool/postfix/public.
postfix
  Primary group for the postfix pseudo-user used by the postfix(1) mail transfer agent.
games
  Used by various set-group-id (setuid(7)) games to maintain high-scores files and other common files in /var/games.
named
  Primary group for the named pseudo-user used by the named(8) DNS nameserver daemon.
ntpd
  Primary group for the ntpd pseudo-user used by the ntpd(8) network time protocol daemon.
sshd
  Primary group for the sshd pseudo-user used by the sshd(8) secure shell daemon.
_pflogd
  Primary group for the _pflogd pseudo-user used by the pflogd(8) log daemon with the pf(4) packet filter.
_rwhod
  Primary group for the _rwhod pseudo-user used by the rwhod(8) system status daemon.
staff
  Staff users, in contrast to regular or guest users. Not used by NetBSD; available for the administrator's interpretation.
_proxy
  Primary group for the _proxy pseudo-user used by the ftp-proxy(8) and tftp-proxy(8) proxy daemons with packet filters such as pf(4) or ipnat(4).
_timedc
  Primary group for the _timedc pseudo-user used by the timedc(8) tool to communicate with the timed(8) time server daemon.
_sdpd
  Primary group for the _sdpd pseudo-user used by the sdpd(8) Bluetooth service discovery protocol daemon.
_httpd
  Primary group for the _httpd pseudo-user used by the httpd(8) (bozohttpd) web server.
_mdnsd
  Primary group for the _mdnsd pseudo-user used by the mdnsd(8) multicast DNS and DNS service discovery daemon.
_tests
  Primary group for the _tests pseudo-user used by atf(7) automatic tests that request to run unprivileged.
_tcpdump
  Primary group for the _tcpdump pseudo-user used by the tcpdump(8) network traffic dumper and analyzer.
_tss
  Primary group for the _tss pseudo-user used by the tcsd(8) ‘Trusted Computing’ daemon to manage a TPM.
_gpio
  Users authorized to read and write GPIO pins; see gpio(4) and gpioctl(8).
_dhcpcd
  Primary group for the _dhcpcd pseudo-user used by the dhcpcd(8) DHCP Client Daemon.
_rtadvd
  Primary group for the _rtadvd pseudo-user used by the rtadvd(8) IPv6 network router advertisement daemon.
guest
  Guest users, in contrast to staff or regular users. Not used by NetBSD; available for the administrator's interpretation.
_unbound
  Primary group for the _unbound pseudo-user used by the unbound(8) recursive DNS resolver.
_nsd
  Primary group for the _nsd pseudo-user used by the nsd(8) authoritative DNS nameserver.
nvmm
  Users authorized to use the nvmm(4) NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor.
nobody
  Primary group for the traditional nobody pseudo-user. 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.
utmp
  Group of utmp(5) login records.
authpf
  Used by the set-group-id (setuid(7)) program authpf(8) to configure authenticated gateways.
users
  Regular users, in contrast to staff or guest users.

  Default primary group for new users, as set in the default usermgmt.conf(5) file. Some administrators may instead prefer to assign to each user a unique group with the same name as the user by passing the ‘`-g` `=uid`’ option to useradd(8).

dialer
  Users authorized to make outgoing modem calls. Unused in modern NetBSD.
nogroup
  Pseudo-group.

# SEE ALSO

users(7)

April 2, 2020 | NetBSD 11.0