[techtalk] default umask

[Julie]

From: Naomi Hospodarsky <naomi-hospodarsky at uiowa.edu>

> What can anyone tell me about umask, and how it can work for me as an 
> administrator of users....just looking for simple tips, personal 
> situations, etc, if there are any.

The answer is "It Depends."  Mostly "It Depends" on the use of
the machine and how you have set up all of your users and groups.

If you put all of your users into a single group you =generally=
need to use a umask of 077 to prevent other users from having
read (or even read-write) access to other users files. If this
doesn't bother you and your users, well, obviously it's not a
problem!

If you put all of your users into individual groups (such as, each
user "sue" has a matching primary group "sue"), then a umask
of 007 is fine -- all of the files she creates will have a different
group ID from that of other users.  But then you have the problem
of "sue" creating files which are sharable, so perhaps it then
makes sense (if users have to be able to share ...) for all of the
users to be in additional shared groups.  Then they can change
the group ID of files they wish to share with  other users.

-- Julie (who doesn't sysadmin anymore 'cuz she's too busy ...).