Date: Tue, 18 Jul 95 11:14:44 MDT From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) To: henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu (Charles Henrich) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: UID > 65536 works ? Message-ID: <9507181714.AA24069@cs.weber.edu> In-Reply-To: <199507181453.KAA07990@crh.cl.msu.edu> from "Charles Henrich" at Jul 18, 95 10:53:57 am
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> I removed the UID > 65536 check in pw_mkdb, and then created a uid of 250000. > Everything appeared to work as would be expected, is there any reason this > check is there, other than historical? And can we remove it? The check is there for interoperability with FreeBSD as an NIS master or slave (not client) with a non-FreeBSD slave or client (not master). This is because in order for the entries to be useful on most older systems, you have to fit their idea of uid_t and gid_t. On FreeBSD, these are unsigned longs; on older systems, they are unsigned (or even signed) shorts. By moving this restriction, you are breaking interoperability. Potentially, the line transfer representation in NIS would cause the values to be truncated before they are sent out (instead of being truncated by the recieving system). I haven't checked the NIS code to be sure ...but you can while you are in there putting it back 8-). Probably, the code wants comments to this effect so it doesn't happen again. Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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