Re: should not specify default group for users

[tytso@MIT.EDU]

   From: gk4@us.ibm.com
   Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2000 12:20:27 -0600

   The NASA Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) recommends <= 999
   reserved for sys admins.

There are two issues here.  System administrators would be wise to use
uids > 1000 for user ID's, since some OS's (notably Irix, if I recall
correctly) use UID's 0--999.

However, Linux distributors would be wise to only use UID's to between 0
and 99 for system users, since otherwise you'll mess up some system
administrator who chose unwisely and created user id's under 999.
Similarly, it would be wise for Linux distributors to set up the
defaults to encourage system administrators to userid's > 1000.  If they
need to use id's between 100 and 999 they should be able to force the
user add program, but they should be asked the "are you sure" question.

All of this is arguably not all that imporant for the LSB, though,
since for most applications shouldn't care about this.  The one place
where applications might care is those who need to allocate a UID for
their package installation.  This is relatively rare, and the explicit
mechanisms for how to do this can probably be deferred to a later
version of the LSB.  (In some cases the administrator may want to
choose an explicit user ID for the "oracle" or "informix" userid, or
may want a userid picked from a different range than user id's.  So
having the preinstall script run "useradd" may not be the best way to
solve the problem.)

						- Ted