Should this be happening?

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Level 7

20,560 points

Should this be happening?

Hi

I have an iMac with OS X.4.11 on the internal drive and have recently bought leopard.

I wanted to try Leopard first before trashing the Tiger installation, so installed afresh to an external USB drive then booted from this.

All worked fine, but I then started noticing that I could access account folders on the Tiger installation on the internal drive.

For example pressing the sidebar item for files in last 24 hours (or Today, or whatever it's called), brought up a couple of new files on the new Leopard installation drive, but also showed files from an account of the same name (but completely different password) on the internal drive.

This just doesn't seem very secure - it would seem to me that all I would need to do would be to plug in an external drive to another Mac then boot from ext drive and I would be able to see any accounts that weren't mine automatically.

Conversely I can see the corresponding account folder in Leopard (different password) from Tiger.

Sorry if this is a fundamental permissions question!

AC

iMac Core 2 Duo 20", Mac OS X (10.4.11), Intel Macbook, iPhone, old Risc OS and Windows boxes!

Posted on Dec 20, 2007 12:08 PM

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Answer 1

Dec 20, 2007 12:45 PM in response to Alley_Cat

Alley_Cat wrote:
For example pressing the sidebar item for files in last 24 hours (or Today, or whatever it's called), brought up a couple of new files on the new Leopard installation drive, but also showed files from an account of the same name (but completely different password) on the internal drive.

The password being different doesn't matter: this is only used to authenticate the account to the system, and once authenticated the account has certain privileges, like owning files.

In fact the account names being the same in the two systems doesn't matter either. Ownership of the files is governed by a numeric User ID and this is probably the same in your Tiger and Leopard installations.

So what you are seeing is perfectly normal, and how permissions work.

This just doesn't seem very secure - it would seem to me that all I would need to do would be to plug in an external drive to another Mac then boot from ext drive and I would be able to see any accounts that weren't mine automatically.

If you have physical access to the machine, basically all bets are off.

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Answer 2

Alley_Cat Author

Level 7

20,560 points

Dec 21, 2007 10:00 AM in response to Michael Conniff

Thanks Michael

That clarifies things - I need to do some reading up on accounts/permission etc I think.

Anyway the Leopard install seems to have hosed itself as of last night so back to the start with that!

AC

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