ID Numbering in Group and Passwd

[Dave Brown]

I can see 2 ways to resolve the issue from a Fedora development perspective.

1. Similar to the suggestion you have put forward below - Change UID_MAX to
say 40,000 and change GID_MIN to 40,001. That will stop uids and gids from
colliding and is a pretty easy solution to implement from a change
perspective. Raises a problem tho that what UID will the 39,501th user have?
We cant just increase the UID_MAX as there'll be groups using the numbers
above 40,000 and we'll run into the same problem as we're having now.
Chances are you'll be using NIS or LDAP if you've got this many users but
its probably not good practice to be assuming the user management practices
of the masses.

2. Change the useradd / luseradd code to find the lowest unique uid / gid
combination when creating any new user. This is harder to implement because
it involves rewriting the underlying code of useradd but it is a more
complete and scalable solution because you can change the UID, GID MIN, MAX
values to whatever and it'll still work and users will always have their uid
equal to their gid. I tend to favaour this solution because of it's
completeness and scalability.

Robin / Others - what do you think? Depending on the general consensus I'll
probably submit a feature enhancement request.

In response to Tim and Justin - you'd hope that the CLI and GUI tools doing
the same thing would be using the same underlying code / library to achieve
it so there is consistency across the 2 tools but it looks like theyre not
:o(

Thanks all for your responses.

Dave

On 23/11/05, Robin Laing <Robin.Laing at drdc-rddc.gc.ca> wrote:
>
> Craig White wrote:
> > On Wed, 2005-11-23 at 10:46 -0700, Robin Laing wrote:
> >
> >>Dave Brown wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> >
> > ----
> > I think that you will a number of these 'defaults' can be adjusted by
> > editing:
> >
> > /etc/default/useradd
> > /etc/login.defs
> >
> > Craig
> >
> >
>
> Hey, I learned something today.
>
> In /etc/login.defs,
>
> #
> # Min/max values for automatic uid selection in useradd
> #
> UID_MIN                   500
> UID_MAX                 60000
>
> #
> # Min/max values for automatic gid selection in groupadd
> #
> GID_MIN                   500
> GID_MAX                 60000
>
> may solve the whole mess.
>
> It may be a nice idea to change these defaults to prevent this
> headache in the future.  I will play with this at home and then submit
> an enhancement request if it works as I would like.
>
> Thank you for the info.
>
> Robin
>
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