Fedora User Management (revisited)

[Enrico Scholz]

Simo Sorce <ssorce at redhat.com> writes:

> Why do we need fixed uids at all? is it so difficult to use
> getpwnam() ??

Most filesystems store only the uid/gid, not the name of a user.


>> When my shadow-utils patch gets accepted, shadow-util's '--hint' option
>> can be used too.
>
> I don't see grabbing random areas above 500 to serve any useful
> purpose, if they are not fixed, than you can easily just do dynamic
> allocation, from the app point of view it is exactly the same. I
> really do not understand what you think you fix by creating a range
> variable fixed scheme.

I create predictable uids; when I install a package which creates user
'foo' on machine A and on machine B, user 'foo' should have the same
uid (e.g. because they share filesystem resources). I like it too, to
reinstall a system without the need of complicated 'chown -rh' orgies
to make huge data partitions from previous installation usable.


> Either an application needs a fixed uid/gid for some particular reason
> or it just can allocate an uid/gid dynamically.

Most daemons are candidates for fixed uid/gid; unfortunately, there is
only a small range (0-100) available. 'fedora-usermgmt' *allows* the
administrator to use a free range of uids for service users.

'fedora-usermgmt' is completely transparent transparent: either you know
about it and use it, or it behaves like a plain 'useradd'.
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