unknown user and group ids

[Dave Ihnat]

On Fri, Jul 01, 2005 at 09:50:13AM -0400, Warren Lamboy wrote:
> <<Complains about unrecognized user, group IDs>>
> ...
> For example I have some directories owned by userid = 608 and
> groupid=20012.  Neither of these are valid according to Red Hat
> User Manager (with no filter on the user and group list).

First, please recall that the numeric userid/groupid is the REAL
owner/group of a filesystem object; it's a courtesy to weak human memories
that Unix/Linux associates these numbers with the names in /etc/passwd
and etc/group.

> Can someone tell me how these ids might be getting assigned to files and
> directories on this system?

If you've a userid/groupid that doesn't map to one in the passwd/group
file, it most likely resulted from something like unpacking a tar file
from a foreign system as root.  In such a case, the original userid/groupid
from the foreign system will be retained.

Whenever you encounter such files and/or directories, determine who SHOULD
own them and use chown to reassign ownership.

AFAIK, there's no specific tool to identify such filesystem objects--probably
because slapping a script together to traverse the filesystem and find them
is pretty trivial.

G'luck,
--
	Dave Ihnat
	ignatz at dminet.com