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Re: Passwd/Group changes proposal v2



> 
> On Wed, 20 Nov 1996 17:53:00 GMT Ian Jackson (ian@chiark.greenend.org.
> uk) wrote:
> 
> > Philippe Troin:
> > > * Qmail:
> > > Will allocate 7 UIDs and 1 GID in the 0-99 range. Christian, would 
> > > you please send me the exact names you want ASAP ?
> > ...
> > > * Enforcement of Ian Jackson's policy. That means that qmail might 
> > > then be relocated into higher UID/GID space.
> > 
> > I object, I'm afraid: changing the id associated with a name is
> > practically impossible.  Please allocate qmail's ids above 65000.  We
> > can have qmail depend on an approprate version of adduser.
> 
> Changing UIDs for a program just means for a package to depend on a new version of base-passwd right ?

No, it's more complicated than that.

Right now, I'm UID 1000 on my Debian machine.  If I were to change my 
UID to 1100, I would also have to change the ownership of every file I 
own, on every disk --including removable ones-- to UID 1100 as well.  
This is not trivial by any stretching of that word.

It is so difficult that when I wanted (for reasons of email) to change 
my username, I did it by creating a new user with the same UID/GID and 
password as the old (there were reasons why I just didn't change the 
name at the time).

I made the suggestion in the thread about SUID programs ("Suid 
Manager", started by Christoph Lameter) that a control file and 
accociated software be added to handle installation of dynamically 
allocated users/groups and files associated with those users (including 
file modes).  This would simplify the problem, since, in theory, 
anyway, all files owned by the dynamic user to be reallocated would be 
listed on one spot.  The problem comes with spooled data, though.  That 
would not be listed anywhere, but presumably the install scripts could 
deal with that issue.

> 
> 
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     Buddha Buck                      bmbuck@acsu.buffalo.edu
"Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our
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