ID Numbering in Group and Passwd

[Robin Laing]

Dave Brown wrote:
> I have had a look at the RFE you filed and to be honest i disagree with 
> the way you have asked for it to be fixed. By selecting the GIDs in 
> decending order from 60,000 down and the uid ascending from 500 there 
> still exists the possibility for these 2 numbers to collide if you have 
> more than 59500 users / groups. Granted this is a large number but for 
> big institutions / companies this isnt unreasonable. I personally have 
> worked with two installations that this numbering scheme would have 
> caused problems.
> 
> I believe that the underlying code should be changed so that when adding 
> a user the lowest available number which is not currently used by either 
> a group or user should be the one selected. That way you can have as 
> many users as you want (up to 2^32 of course :o) without running into 
> any clashes.
>  
> I will add a note to your RFE explaining my thoughts and see what RedHat 
> reckon. Thanks for your input.
> 
> Cheers
> Dave
> 
> On 26/11/05, *Robin Laing * <Robin.Laing at drdc-rddc.gc.ca 
> <mailto:Robin.Laing at drdc-rddc.gc.ca>> wrote:
> 
>     Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu wrote:
>      > On Thu, 2005-24-11 at 09:31 +0000, Dave Brown wrote:
>      >
>      >>Robin / Others - what do you think? Depending on the general
>     consensus
>      >>I'll probably submit a feature enhancement request.
>      >
>      >
>      > If you do enter a RFE, can you send a reply to this thread with
>     bugzilla
>      > #?  I'd like to watch it since I've recently run into this problem -
>      > it's a major pain in the ass.
>      >
>      > Regards,
>      >
>      > Ranbir
>      >
> 
>     I entered an RFE this afternoon.
>     Bug 174205
> 
>     Robin.
> 
Some times I am not that good at explaining things.

I have added to the RFE taking your comments into account as you will 
see.  I am reposting some of my comments here for the list.

I used 60,00 as an arbitrary number.  If Fedora can work with 2^32 
GID's then change 60,000 to 2^32 and work from there.  It isn't a big 
deal.

The idea is to search from high to low for GID's and low to high for 
UID/GID combos.

This also minimizes any holes in the UID/GID mix unless users are deleted.

Thanks for the suggestion.