ID Numbering in Group and Passwd

[James Wilkinson]

Dave Brown wrote:
> 1. Similar to the suggestion you have put forward below - Change UID_MAX to
> say 40,000 and change GID_MIN to 40,001. That will stop uids and gids from
> colliding and is a pretty easy solution to implement from a change
> perspective. Raises a problem tho that what UID will the 39,501th user have?
> We cant just increase the UID_MAX as there'll be groups using the numbers
> above 40,000 and we'll run into the same problem as we're having now.
> Chances are you'll be using NIS or LDAP if you've got this many users but
> its probably not good practice to be assuming the user management practices
> of the masses.

UIDs and GIDs are supposed to be 32-bit these days (there's a nfsnobody
on my system with a UID and GID of 4294967294). So you could start GIDs
at 2 billion. That ought to be enough for most people.

On the other hand, not everything out there is 32-bit clean. There'll
probably be someone who wants to connect this system to something that
only understands 16 bit UIDs.

James.

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