Re: System users that receive mail in /var/mail/systemuser?
On Sun, Apr 09, 2006 at 07:53:44PM +0200, Andreas Metzler wrote:
> Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> wrote:
> > On Sun, 2006-04-09 at 12:25 +0200, Andreas Metzler wrote:
> [...]
> >> And now I am wondering whether this will break existing packages.
>
> > Maybe not *packages*, but possibly non-Debian software.
>
> non-Debian software, running in the Debian system-user id range?
* Some other distributions (I believe RedHat is one of them, but am not
sure) have their user UID range start at 500 rather than 1000. If
someone is using Debian in a hybrid environment where the usernames
are centralized on the network (using NIS or LDAP, or something
similar), you will probably break mail for people with 500 <= UID <
1000 if you go doing this blindly. Note that, because of the NIS/LDAP
possibility, it's not necessary that the sysadmin has reconfigured
adduser to not create system users in the 500-1000 range, so checking
for that isn't necessarily going to work.
* System users on a Debian system are created with the --system
argument. On reading the manpage, these users are called "system
users", not "Debian system users"; so non-Debian software could very
well be using that by using the documented API.
--
Fun will now commence
-- Seven Of Nine, "Ashes to Ashes", stardate 53679.4
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