(no subject)

[gs_stoller at juno.com]

	I discovered the user "operator" in  UNIX , found it in the
book "Essential System Administration" by AEleen Frisch, and it has
features that I would like to use.  The book says (on page 131) that
this user exists on some  BSD  systems and it is used for back-ups
and such.  It is like  superuser  ( root )  in that it can access any
file regardless of the permission bits, but it operates readonly,
it cannot modify unless the permission bits allow it to do so.
	I checked  /etc/passwd  and found that  operator  is a user
(in  FreeBSD 4.3 ).  When I tried it out, I found some directories
that  operator  couldn't enter and checked a few of those directories
and found that they gave absolutely no access to 'other' users,
explaining why  operator  couldn't enter those directories.  I feel
that this is an error since it doesn't allow  operator  to do its
stated task.  Similarly,  operator  cannot access plain files
unless the permission bits allow it to do so.
	Please implement this user as the book lists it, this will
give the  FreeBSD  community a useful capability.  We could check
 LINUX  and see if they have have it properly implemented; if so
we could copy it making the necessary changes, an easier task.

         uname -a  for my system gives:
FreeBSD  4.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE #0: Sat Apr 21 10:54:49 GMT 2001     jkh at narf.osd.bsdi.com:/usr/src/sys/compile/GENERIC  i386