User`s guide

Other Technical Requirements
16 Installation and Migration Guide
Unix and Linux User Accounts for the
Server
When the iPlanet Web Server starts, it runs with a Unix or Linux user account
that you specify during installation. Any child processes of the server are
created with this account as the owner. It is best to create a Unix or Linux
account for the server that has restricted access to your system resources. The
account needs read permissions for the configuration files and write
permissions for the logs directory. For security reasons, the user account
shouldn’t have write permissions to some of the configuration files, though
some, such as the access control files, should be group writable.
In addition, the user account you create for the server should belong to a group
that contains the server users for all iPlanet servers so that multiple servers can
have access to shared files.
If you don’t create a dedicated user account for iPlanet Web Server, on many
platforms you can use the account with the name nobody, but you might not
want to give the user nobody permissions for running the iPlanet Web Server.
In addition, the user nobody might not work on some systems. Some systems
assign a user ID of -2 for the user nobody. A user ID of less than 0 generates
an error during installation. Check the /etc/passwd file to see if the uid for
nobody exists, and make sure it is greater than 0.
Note It’s strongly recommended that you use a dedicated account for the server.
The Administration Server can also run with a user account that has write
permissions to the configuration files for all installed servers. However, it’s
much easier to run the Administration Server as root because then the
Administration Server user can start and stop servers with port numbers less
than 1024. (Port numbers greater than 1024 can be started by any user).
The user you use to run the iPlanet Web Server (often nobody) must be in the
same group as the user you use to run the Administration Server (often root).
Warning If you plan to use SNMP, you must run both the iPlanet Web Server instance
and the Administration Server as root.