[webintosh]

Finally went ahead and enabled PHP and MySQL on my PowerBook. Thanks to a great article by Scott Hacker in this month's Macworld, it was a sinch.

I'm a little worried that I didn't set up a unique MySQL user account via the Users control panel before hand. Most tutorials tell you to do this, but Hacker's article makes no mention of it.

Now when I try to set up a MySQL user, OS X tells me there's already a user with that short name.

Is there anyway I can go back and do this? Is there even a need to do this? All of my PHP/MySQL tests worked fine, so I'm a little confused what this account is for.

[zorn]

OS X 10.2 installs a 'mysql' user by default (10.1, 10.0 did not). AFAIK, this is mainly for the server since it comes with MySQL preinstalled, yet on OS X client I intalled MySQL (using Marc's Lipackage, http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/mysql/)
and it seems to be ran by this user. Use Process Viewer to check yours.

I say you're in the clear and shouldn't give it too much thought.

[Gavin]

Originally posted by webintosh:
....so I'm a little confused what this account is for.

Hi,

Most software has a bug or two that can be exploited somehow. Servers are especially vulnerable; Apache, SSH, MySQL, Sendmail, etc. have security fixes all the time to plug holes.

If a bad guy breaks into and controls a running server, like MySQL, he has all the privileges of the user that is running the server process.

For security you create users with limited permissions in order to run server programs, like www for the web server. UNIX can have several users running programs on the computer at the same time.

The mysql user only runs the mysql server and has no other privileges so if someone cracks it they can't take over your whole box, erase all your files, use your computer to send spam, turn your machine into a porno FTP site, etc.

A good installer will check your system for whatever user it wants to run as and add it if it has to.

The system user that the server runs as has nothing to do with logging in and doing database stuff.

To see it in action open the terminal and type:
ps aux

This will show you all the programs running on your box and the users that are running them.

Also if you look under 'users' in NetInfo Manager (utilities folder) you can see all the specialty user accounts.

Have fun