Nextpvr system user

[VCR58]

After getting Debian 10 installed with KDE Plasma desktop, I successfully installed Nextpvr and got it running of a PC. 

After logging of the PC out I found there were two users on the login screen! One user was me and the other was Nextpvr. I couldn't actually log in to the Nextpvr account as every password I used failed. My login works fine. I attached a screen grab of the User account manager showing the two users.  I could delete the nextpvr user account but I don't know if that will mess up Nextpvr. If I select "delete" it asks if I want to delete all the files associated with the account, so I didn't.

I know I didn't create a user named "Nextpvr" so I guess it was created during the Nextpvr install. Is there anything I can do to get rid of the Nextpvr user on the linux login screen?

[mvallevand]

Yes that account is created with reduced rights and with access to tuner devices for the service and is needed with nextpvr-helper defaults. It also protects you if you run the web server remotely and the server gets hacked.

I never noticed this before because I run my NextPVR box headless. There are lots of solutions if you do a web search and response vary by distro, theme and desktop manager you are using.

One that seems to be most portable is to copy

/var/lib/AccountsService/users/Rex to /var/lib/AccountsService/users/nextpvr (if it doesn't exist) and change this setting to true
SystemAccount=true

I read that sometimes just removing the line also works. YMMV.

Note you can login on to the account from a shell with a sudo password

sudo -u nextpvr bash

Martin

[VCR58]

Thanks Martin. I'm glad I didn't delete the nextpvr account I'll give those this a try and post back what works.

[VCR58]

...  There are lots of solutions if you do a web search  and response vary by distro, theme and desktop manager you are using.

There was no file listed in "/var/lib/AccountsService/users" and creating a file to set the user to "SystemAccount=true" per instructions on the web didn't work.

The solution that did work was to change the nextpvr user id. 

id -u nextpvr  returned 1001

According to the web searches I read, any id < 1000 is considered not human (system). So, I used this command to find all users with id's 1000 or lower.

Code:

sudo awk -F: '($3 <= 1000) {printf "%s:%s\n",$1,$3}' /etc/passwd

Then chose an id that was not being used and modified nextpvr id using "sudo usermod -u 998 nextpvr"  (found out nextpvr-server needs to be stopped before doing this).

After a reboot the login screen only showed my user account.  Nextpvr seems to be ok with this change.

[mvallevand]

Yes I read that one too, glad you got it going.

Martin

[VCR58]

I was wondering, how does Nextpvr get a user id assigned to it? Is it possible to control a range of id numbers with the nextpvr-helper.deb like less than 1000?

[mvallevand]

I use useradd and updated the installer to use the -r option after your first post which should define it as system from the beginning.

Martin