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Policy for 32-bit uids/gids?



[Re-sent due to inability to properly address email.]

Section 10.2 of policy currently describes uid and gid classes covering
the range of 0-65535.  This appears to no longer be comprehensive: on a
current system running a 2.4.18 kernel and libc6 2.3.1-17, I'm able to
assign 32-bit userids to accounts and reference these accounts in file
ownerships, su to them, etc.  Should Debian Policy be expanded to
address this greatly increased range of available ids?

This is in fact a leading question.  With version 3.0, Samba adds
increased support for foreign SIDs -- that is, NT-style uids and gids
corresponding to remote NT domains -- which nevertheless need to be
mapped to ids on the local system to be useful.  This is normally
handled by allocating a pool of uids and gids on the Unix system for
use by "idmap".  I believe it would be of benefit to many Debian users
of the samba packages if the default configuration included a reasonable
pool of uids and gids for this purpose.  When I say "reasonable" here, I
do mean "able to accomodate the ACL needs of a moderate-sized corporate
WAN":  the 60000-64999 range /might/ be sufficient, if Debian were
willing to allocate the whole thing to Samba. ;)  However, with the
recent availability of 32-bit uids, this seems unnecessary.  I would
suggest allocating a 16-bit range out of the remaining (2^32-2^16) uids
for Samba's use, and the same for gids; even something as small as 5000
uids should be ok, since admins always have the option of choosing a
different range -- it's just a question of how useful the defaults will
be to our users.

-- 
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer

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