[Fedora-packaging] packages which add user accounts: is fedora-usermgmt the way?

Steven Pritchard steve at silug.org
Tue Jul 5 16:01:30 UTC 2005


On Mon, Jul 04, 2005 at 06:31:42PM +0200, Christian.Iseli at licr.org wrote:
> That's the part I don't understand: why a global registry ?
> 
> Isn't the point of adding local UIDs to get a kind of macro thing, i.e. what 
> is standard is the name, which should be the same on all machines, but nobody 
> cares what the actual UID is ?

I have to agree.  I can't think of a single reason why it would matter
(for example) what UID the openvpn user is on any system.  It's just
an unprivileged user that openvpn can be configured to run as (after
starting as root).  I could use "nobody", but, well, that seems to be
bad form these days.

> I agree it can get a bit hairy when several machines share things by NFS, but 
> having a central global UID registry also seems hairy.

In that case, there's NIS/NIS+/LDAP/whatever, and it is up to the
sysadmin to do any extra work necessary to integrate the package into
their environment.  In the case of my openvpn package, if "useradd -r"
does the right thing, then the problem is solved.  If not, the
sysadmin can just add an openvpn user before installing the package.

Steve
-- 
Steven Pritchard - K&S Pritchard Enterprises, Inc.
Email: steve at kspei.com             http://www.kspei.com/
Phone: (618)398-3000               Mobile: (618)567-7320




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