From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Sep 2 7: 4: 7 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from axl.noc.iafrica.com (axl.noc.iafrica.com [196.31.1.175]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9AA51155D1 for ; Thu, 2 Sep 1999 07:03:38 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from sheldonh@axl.noc.iafrica.com) Received: from sheldonh (helo=axl.noc.iafrica.com) by axl.noc.iafrica.com with local-esmtp (Exim 3.02 #1) id 11MXQq-0006hV-00; Thu, 02 Sep 1999 16:01:40 +0200 From: Sheldon Hearn To: Markus Stumpf Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Proposal: Add generic username for 3rd-party MTA's In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 02 Sep 1999 15:42:56 +0200." <19990902154256.D4058@space.net> Date: Thu, 02 Sep 1999 16:01:40 +0200 Message-ID: <25760.936280900@axl.noc.iafrica.com> Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Thu, 02 Sep 1999 15:42:56 +0200, Markus Stumpf wrote: > The numeric id IS important. > How do you think NFS maintains privileges across machines? I have no idea how NFS works. :-) I _do_ know that, if machines across the network need to know about magical IDs on their peers, then it's nothing like how SMTP works, and thus irrelevant to the username I think we should add. > This also has nothing to do with emotions ... it's my experience from > the time I worked at the computing staff at the univ, where we had to > maintain a few thousand users on a few hundred machines of all types. The tools which help you add users default to a minimum UID of 1000. If users have been added with very low UID's, they've been added manually. This change won't be uncomfortable for people who have their hands that deep into the system. More to the point, though, who cares whether the user's ID is 25 on one box, 12 on another and 2525 on a third? The _name_ is what we're looking for, here. > In some perspectives ($HOMEs, mail, standard programs, shared document > space) the machines had to look and feel alike for the users. > > We noticed that the predefined uids/gids on the systems were nearly > useless for that tasks (as they were all different) ID's _are_ useless for the task of look'n'feel. That's what usernames are for. > If in such an environemt the uid 25 is already used for some other > service it's a pain to integrate new FreeBSD machines from the > moment FreeBSD comes shipped with uid 25 allocated to a user smtp. I'm not catering for people who create accounts with low UID's and then try to 1) Merge in master.passwd entries from subsequent FreeBSD releases without using their eyes. 2) Install STABLE packages on RELEASE systems. Ciao, Sheldon. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message