Re: RFC: Fixing the "nobody" user?
On 18 July 2016 at 08:39, Lennart Poettering <mzerqung(a)0pointer.de> wrote:
Heya!
I'd like to start a discussion regarding the "nobody" user on Fedora,
and propose that we change its definition sooner or later. I am not
proposing a feature according to the feature process for this yet, but
my hope is that these discussions will lead to one eventually.
I am not against this proposal. It has been tried at least once before
in the past but those failed due to a lot of programs secretly relying
on the seperate uids and not a lot of people being able to fix it.
I am not 100% certain that it was mostly 99 due to issues with various
network authentication systems from long ago. (ypbind/ldap/etc) where
the MAX-2 UID was not assigned to nobody but some other system
account. I think this is why SUSE went with the range of uids because
MAX-1 -> MAX-16 was used in various OS's for a large amount of system
accounts.
That is from a time when the world was rules by UNIX and Linux was a
little thing. These days it is a different matter and we can try and
be more flexible. I would say that UID 99 is going to need to be set
to oldnobody or some such thing because of the upgraders versus fresh
installers and it will need to be kept that way for the eventual EL
branch.
--
Stephen J Smoogen.