Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2006 16:06:03 +0200 From: Jonathan McKeown <jonathan@hst.org.za> To: FreeBSD Questions list <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: ports adding users Message-ID: <200610121606.04119.jonathan@hst.org.za>
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This is, I guess, a philosophical question. Twice in the last couple of weeks I have been bitten by ports adding users or groups. In setting up my laptop, I created my user account in sysinstall without creating my group. My ~ was created with the GID corresponding to my UID, but in building KDE, comms/gnokii used pw groupadd and was allocated `my' GID, resulting in my ~ being group-owned by gnokii. More seriously, we are moving our user accounts into LDAP and I now have a problem on a server where I installed net/isc-dhcp3-server before configuring pam_ldap and nss_ldap. As a result the dhcpd user (in /etc/passwd) and one of my user accounts (in LDAP) have the same UID and GID. Disentangling these is going to be... interesting. After some digging about, I see I can effectively reserve a block of UIDs/GIDs by starting my UID numbering at (1001 + x), and creating /etc/pw.conf with reuseuids yes reusegids yes to use the UIDs/GIDs between 1000 and (1000 + x) (otherwise pw just allocates a UID/GID higher than any in use, which puts it right back in my reserved range). Perhaps I should also set the maxuid/maxgid options too, just in case? That's one option. Another is to expect dozens of busy port maintainers to cover for me by reserving UIDs/GIDs instead of creating random users. Another is to arrange somehow that the ports infrastructure provide a pw.conf which can be used when pw is called by ports, that limits the range of UIDs/GIDs that a port can be allocated so that it doesn't overlap with the range generally used for user accounts. Thoughts? Jonathan
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