user 'hal'?

[Jay Camp]

On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 12:49 -0400, Art Alexion wrote:
> I was checking my groups and users and found that the cdrom and floppy
> groups contained the mysterious user, 'hal'.  Where did this come from? 
> Is it a security breach?

hal is the user for the Hardware Abstraction Layer.  The account doesn't
have a password (you can look directly in /etc/shadow to see) so nobody
can log in as it.  It handles automounting removable media (such as
CD-ROM's, usb keys, etc.) as well in the future of handling other
devices such as batteries and many other things.

Jay