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Re: UID allocation policy [Re: automatic adduser/addgroup ...]



>>>>> "IJ" == Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk> writes:

IJ> It seems to me that sensible defaults which break fewest things are to
IJ> have dynamically allocated system ids to go from 100-999, and
IJ> dynamically allocated ids for users to go from 1000-9999.  10000-59999
IJ> is by default reserved for any special purposes we can come up with
IJ> later (but we promise that they'll be dynamically allocated too).

As I tried to argue before, that scheme breaks (IMHO) on a lot of existing
clusters of UN*X workstations. There, the precedence is that regular
user accounts start at 100 or 101 and go upwards. How do you want to
integrate a debian box using your proposed scheme into such an
environment? Especially, as soon as NIS or something else gets used to
share /etc/passwd among the clients you are forced to use identical
UIDs for all shared accounts.

The only way out I see is to use a different range for dynamically
allocated system accounts and fix the software that gets broken by
this. That will only affect a few developers compared to affecting a
lot of system adminstrators who will have to fix their existing
installation to accomodate debian systems. [Or decree that no debian
system which is member of a heterogeneous cluster is allowed to
install packages which require dynamically allocated system accounts
:-) ]

			Cheers,
				Lukas
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   Dr. Lukas Nellen                 | Email: lukas@teorica0.ifisicacu.unam.mx
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