Re: automatic adduser/addgroup in postinst (was Re: fingerd)

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>]

Lukas Nellen writes (SuperCite undone - iwj):
> Just a comment about allocating UID's - we should try to keep the
> range of UID's reserved/automatically allocated for DEBIAN systems as
> small as reasonably possible.
> 
> Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk> writes:
> > Currently 0-99 and 65534 are allocated statically by the base
> > system maintainer, 100-999 are allocated dynamically by
> > adduser for system users and groups and 1000 onwards for
> > ordinary users.
> 
> If I remember correctly, many commercial UN*Xes only reserve the UID's
> up to about 100 or 200 for system accounts, the rest is allocated by
> the adduser script (or whatever its equivalent is called). If you want
> to add a DEBIAN box to a heterogeneous cluster made up of such
> machines you might have a problem as the UIDs of all users on all
> machines in the cluster have to be identical - at least if you want to
> export home directories, the mail spool and the like. Does anybody
> have a list of the conventions of other systems? On the DEC ALPHA
> (osf/2), the lowest UID given to an ordinary user is 100.

The current scheme does this.  The fact that it usually starts
allocating system users at 100 won't stop you changing this in its
configuration file, or using 100 yourself to keep it in use.

Ian.