UID_MIN & GID_MIN changed

[Simo Sorce]

On Wed, 2011-05-25 at 20:04 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> On 05/25/2011 06:14 PM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> > Coordination would be nice if we can decide on how we can sanely make
> > changes to this.
> 
> I would think first is to reach consciousness on what the 

Do you mean consesus ? We are pretty conscious of the uid/gid problem
space I believe :)

> reserved/system IDs are supposed to be once that has been done we can 
> start looking at what is the best approach to implement and or fix 
> things that might break because of it.

Changing the reserved id space should break "only" new allocations on
systems that may have used the newly allocated IDs already.
The only way to fix that is to have the admin manually intervene after
the error is brought to his attanetion.

Of course a softer way to deal with this is to not change the defaults
on upgrade if checks reveals IDs in the affected space. The problem is
that it may not be easy to determine this, esp when centralized ID are
also available via NIS/LDAP.

> We admins that are in mixed *nix environment and are stuck with legacy 
> uid/gid already have to *fix* the idiocy being done in configs and 
> application where the min UID/GID is set to anything but 100 ( 
> restricted range ).

There is no need to insult developers that use defaults that are ok for
99% of the users and affect only legacy setups where poor decisions
where made wrt uid/gid allocations.

No default will ever please everyone.

> Basically we whom are living in and running legacy/mixed OS environments 
> are fucked already the main thing here is to reach consciousness across 
> distro's and preferably *nix platforms so we dont be in this crappy 
> situation again after 10 - 20 or 30 years time..

You are asking the impossible, its unreasonable to set the bar to make
any change in this area to some sort of consensus that was not reached
in the past 30 years. It is effectively stalling the process and
preventing change. Which is unreasonable.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York