Other Users in Activity Monitor - secure?

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Level 1

8 points

Other Users in Activity Monitor - secure?

Apppologies if this is a tired topic. I searched but couldn't make enough sense of what I found to apply it to my question; feel free to redirect me to old post(s) if you like. I noticed my DSL modem's activity LED flashing busily when I was doing absolutely nothing online. I did have two internet apps open but they were idle as far as I could tell. I checked Activity Monitor, about which I'm 90% ignorant, and noticed two "Other Users" in there. Is this something I should be concerned about? There are only 2 user acct.s on my puter and they're both me. I'm the only user it has ever had. Not on a network.

Process ID=62
Process Name=WindowServer
User=windowserver

Process ID= 170
Process Name= usbmuxd
User= nobody

1. Wazzup with these "other users", are they OK and why?
2. Any chance somebody could point me to an article or primer or something, that 'splains how to interpret Activity Monitor--in general or from a security POV--for an intermediate-level user who knows little about coding or developing or any of that expert hoo-hah?

TIA!

PowerBook G4, Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Posted on Feb 8, 2008 2:49 PM

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Answer 1

Limnos

Level 10

428,321 points

Feb 8, 2008 3:14 PM in response to longjump

I don't know the details of the activity monitor either, but mine has Windowserve running pretty much all the time so I expect it is something the computer is doing. The other one also has the look of something the computer is doing - maybe USB related?

Do you have your DSL hooked up to a wireless router, and if so, do you have security enabled? If using wireless without password security enabled then you could have some neighbors borrowing service. If it worries you then you could enable that feature. On the other hand I recall back in my ethernet days that my connector would flash even if I wasn't using it for transfers. It appeared to just be checking occasionally.

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Answer 2

longjump Author

Level 1

8 points

Feb 8, 2008 3:29 PM in response to Limnos

Nope, no wireless. BTW my firewalls are all maxed except one port available for a p2p filesharing app which I have not opened since the puter has been turned on. But I think I digress.

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Answer 3

red_menace

Level 6

17,066 points

Feb 8, 2008 4:12 PM in response to longjump

There can be several other "user" accounts that are not associated to someone logging in. The default accounts built in to the system are daemon, nobody, root, unknown, and www, and there can be others depending on what is running on your system (some background processes run as a "user") - for example, appserver, windowserver, securityagent, mysql, jabber, clamxav, etc. You can check the NetInfo Manager (located in the Utilities folder) to see what "users" are on your machine.

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Answer 4

Limnos

Level 10

428,321 points

Feb 8, 2008 4:26 PM in response to longjump

I found [this|http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2005/10/04/activity-monitor.html] and [this|http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-59082.html] and [this about usbmuxd|http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1104968] to help you in learnign about activity monitor.

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