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

Matthew Miller mattdm at mattdm.org
Wed Jul 6 11:31:56 UTC 2005


On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 10:49:07AM +0200, Christian.Iseli at licr.org wrote:
> For standalone machines, the only trouble is when they are re-installed or 
> upgraded.  If the old passwd file can still be read, the problem is easy to 
> solve: just reuse the old UIDs.  When the old passwd file is damaged: you are
> in trouble anyway: the user probably created a few accounts which contain 
> files, and those accounts will need to be hand-recreated with the proper UID 
> anyway...  Having fixed UIDs helps some, but not that much.

I often upgrade by preserving /home and a few key config files but wiping
the system disk. Much faster than the anaconda upgrade option, with cleaner
results. But if I do that, and the UIDs used by packages at install time
change, there will be mis-owned files on the system.


> For machines that share data, IMHO the proper way is to put all accounts
> with distributed files in a UID management thing like LDAP or NIS. It

As previously mentioned, that's not the right thing for system accounts. For
example, it doesn't help the above situation.



-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>
Current office temperature: 78 degrees Fahrenheit.




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