Re: Bits from the release team: the plans for etch
Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes:
> On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 07:24:28AM -0500, Steve Greenland wrote:
> > On 27-Oct-05, 04:39 (CDT), Jonas Meurer <jonas@freesources.org> wrote:
>
> > > it produces at least a bloated passwd/group/shadow file.
>
> > "Bloat"? The /etc/passwd on my development machine, which has seen all
> > kinds of random server installs and removes, has grown to a whole 2K.
> > So it could double before expanding into a second disk block. "Untidy",
> > I'll grant you, but "bloat" seems excessive.
>
> Nah, the biggest hit isn't disk space, it's NSS lookup times from having to
> do a linear search through a flat-file /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow. Well,
> thank God no one uses pam_pwdb anymore, at least...
An other issue that always annoyed me is that assuming a NIS server
and a NIS client which both install say exim. I want to give some
users membership in the group Debian-exim. I can't easily.
The UID picked by Debian-exim is not going to be the same for the NIS
server and all the NIS clients, so I cannot get it propagated by NIS.
And I don't want to have to maintain the group membership on all the
clients.
Currently, the only decent solution is to force the same UID and GID
on all the NIS machines. And propagate the membership through NIS.
Yet some packages do not deal very well with that solution: some are
confused by some user or group that they cannot modify with usermod or
groupmod. Others are confused when removing the user or group
(userdel and groupdel failing to remove a NIS entry).
Phil.
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