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Question

Files and folders owned by root show owned by UID 0

  • March 13, 2017
  • 5 replies
  • 42 views

donmontalvo
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10.12.3 with McAfee EPNS 10.2.1 installed...why is UID 0 showing where we'd expect root to show?

5 replies

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  • Esteemed Contributor
  • March 13, 2017

That should be a major red flag up to McAfee support. The only times on unix environments I've ever seen that happen is when the user or group has been deleted off the system. It leaves the UID of the user or group behind.


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  • Valued Contributor
  • March 13, 2017

Root always has a UID of zero...that being said usually we see the word root. Strange behavior I guess worth looking into but for a sanity check uid for root equals 0.

http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-and-scripting/241644-find-users-root-uid-gid-root-home.html

On the funny level...as an old school System 7-era Mac guy, I dig that they use 'Virex' as an account name. I just hope the code has little traces of Virex left in it. We moved on to Symantec years ago. Not a great Symantec fan or anything, but it's better than System 7-era Virex.


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  • New Contributor
  • March 13, 2017

I saw this quite a bit at my old job. The UID 0 would be taken over by the Guest account. I never figured out what the cause was, but the fix was to delete the rouge Guest account (I don't remember if it was a NEW guest account, or the original guest account, I didn't care).


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@donmontalvo I'll look at that on our configs. We're running the new ENS as well. We haven't had any "issues", but I'd like to see "root" instead of zero. If I see it, I'll bring it up with our McAfee team.


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Here's a quick screenshot of my directory. Shows "root" and I'm running ENS 10.12.1. I'll check a few more systems tomorrow at the office.