Static system level uid/gid's reservations in Fedora/RHEL - how to handle situation?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:30:48 -0400
| From: Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com>

| Ondřej Vašík (ovasik at redhat.com) said: 
| > What's the best way to handle that situation? One possibility is to
| > increase the threshold of system level id's (to 200? 300?), another is
| > to check current reservation and clean long-term unused reservations (I
| > doubt there are many such cases, so it's only temporary solution). Other
| > could be sharing groups (as static uid's are still available), but
| > that's not always good solution.
| > 
| > Any other idea or some prefered solution?
| 
| Simplest way is to bump the lowest number that's used for system IDs;
| that may run into some collisions on older systems, though.

I just thought I'd grumble here.

In 1983, I assigned really high UIDs to my users (my family) on the
first UNIX box I owned.  100 and up.

I really wanted the UIDs to be the same on all my boxes.

A couple of years ago, I tried Ubuntu.  It would not let me keep those
numbers.  But Fedora would, with effort.

I gave up and renumbered on my newest boxes.  It sure is a pain today
when I'm trying to use NFS between an old box and a new one.

I think that Sun supports UID mapping on NFS but Linux does not.

It is also annoying when I move disks between systems.  I guess I
could use FAT :-)