Major upgrade failure -> people maintain > 1 computer

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Wednesday 07 December 2011 14:39:45 Reindl Harald wrote:
> Am 07.12.2011 07:50, schrieb Craig White:
> > out of curiosity, what is the requirement for having uidNumbers starting
> > at 500 instead of 1000?
> 
> because people usually migrate their whole systems from one hardware
> to the next and if you have a lot of users and existing files
> with permissions it is unuseable to have "freddy" 3 times with
> uid 500 and 1 time with uid 1000
> 
> migrate whole system = dd the disk to the next hardware
> migrate whole system = install F9 and stay currently with F15
> 
> did you ever work in an environment with a lot of servers and
> users and used rsync / nfs?

Why would you even consider using Fedora in such an environment? If you have a 
server farm with shared users and use rsync/nfs/whatever, and you have the 
whole thing (or a part of it) running on Fedora, then you'd better be prepared 
to do some nontrivial amount of work when upgrading the Fedora machines.

And yes, that's exactly what I mean --- *work* --- create and execute a script 
to chown across all disks on all machines, update/modify all /etc/passwd and 
/etc/group to reflect the UID+500 change on all systems, and if you happen to 
have more than 500 users to begin with, make sure that you chown the files 
starting from the highest UID's first, since otherwise you might mix up the 
files from user 500 with user 1000. Then you do a complete reimplementation of 
your backup infrastructure, and make sure that you have a contigency plan to 
remap users back and forth in case you need to recover anything from an older 
backup... Etc...

It will require some downtime, rebooting of all servers (maybe 
simultaneously), a couple of days to setup-test-execute, and a couple of weeks 
to be around cleaning up anything that your scripts failed to handle properly. 
That's the job description of a "computer administrator".

Or, you can be a bit wiser and not use Fedora in a production environment to 
begin with.

Best, :-)
Marko