Unusual user "nobody" home directory

Security
1

Hi all,

Please could someone explain this. While doing regular identity checks on my ipfire installation, I noticed that my user “nobody” as a home directory “/home/nobody”. Is this normal for an Ipfire installation? or is something going on somewhere?

Thanks

2

This is not specific to IPFire, is a Linux thing.

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3

Thanks cfusco, I’m aware of that but specifically, I found that my user “nobody” has a home directory which is not normal, is it ?

4

I have it as well. It belongs to unbound. I think it is intentional.

EDIT: for future reference what I wrote above is very misleading. unbound is running as nobody user as well as nobody is used by the WUI system, but it is the latter the one using the home directory, as explained below by @bonnietwin.

5

/home/nobody is deliberately created and has been there since at least 2012.

The user nobody is used for all activities that are carried out via the WUI pages.

The home directory is used as the home environment variable for the apache ssl virtual host that is used for the access to the WUI.

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