Solved added groups and user upgrading from 11.3 to 11.4

noodlefling

noodlefling

In doing a freebsd-update from 11.3-RELEASE to 11.4-RELEASE, two groups and a user were added.

Any idea what the groups "nofiles" and "tests" are for?

Also added was a user called "tests":
Code: 
tests:*:977:977:Unprivileged user for tests:/nonexistent:/usr/sbin/nologin

Seems safe enough, but who's testing what?
 
Sorry to reply to myself, but I did some more examination, and it seems I forgot how the merge process works.

The "tests" user and group is still new, but what it was trying to do was remove the "nofiles" group.

nofiles seems to be a result of the djbdns port.

So the real mystery is what is tests:tests for?
 
Nothing in /var/log/userlog

There's no port or command called "kyua" on the system. The user and group were added during the mergemaster part of the system update from 11.3 to 11.4.

It wasn't automatic, it made me approve it through the editing process.

I didn't see anything about it in the Release Notes.
 
Semi-interestingly, I just updated a test machine from 11.4 to 12.1 and it actually removed the tests user and group during the mergemaster process.

OK, fine!
 
noodlefling said:
Semi-interestingly, I just updated a test machine from 11.4 to 12.1 and it actually removed the tests user and group during the mergemaster process.
Click to expand...
That's probably easy to answer, 12.1 was released before 11.4. The decision to include the tests user/group was made after the 12.1 release. It's a different timeline than you expected.
 
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