ntpd as ntpd user question

[Ian Lepore]

On Sat, 2018-07-21 at 10:47 -0700, bob prohaska wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 21, 2018 at 11:14:45AM -0600, Ian Lepore wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > There's a "pre-world" stage of mergemaster (-Fp option I think) which
> > isn't needed often, but one of the times it is needed is apparently
> > when new user ids are added. ?(So I've been told, I've never much used
> > mergemaster myself). I think there are some words about it at the very
> > bottom of UPDATING.
> > 
> FWIW, installkernel stopped with the note about needing an ntpd user/group.
> Never having been successful with mergemaster (couldn't make heads nor tails
> of the "what to do" prompts) I just ran adduser, creating a locked ntpd user
> and group. Nothing else special done. The machine is up to r336567 on arm64.
> 
> Installkernel ran, I didn't touch anthing in /etc manually and reboot looked normal.
> For now it seems ignorance is bliss....
> 
> If there's something special I should do (beyond locking) to secure the ntpd 
> account please warn me.
> 
> Thanks for reading,
> 
> bob prohaska

I can't see any way that installkernel would lead to the complaint
about the ntpd user not existing; that check is tied to the
installworld target.

A quick way to check whether ntpd is running as ntpd user:

 procstat cred `pgrep ntpd`

 PID  COMM  EUID  RUID SVUID  EGID  RGID SVGID UMASK FLAGS GROUPS
 1176 ntpd   123   123   123   123   123   123   022 -     123

-- Ian