On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 10:49:07AM +0200, Christian.Iseli(a)licr.org wrote:
For standalone machines, the only trouble is when they are
re-installed or
upgraded. If the old passwd file can still be read, the problem is easy to
solve: just reuse the old UIDs. When the old passwd file is damaged: you are
in trouble anyway: the user probably created a few accounts which contain
files, and those accounts will need to be hand-recreated with the proper UID
anyway... Having fixed UIDs helps some, but not that much.
I often upgrade by preserving /home and a few key config files but wiping
the system disk. Much faster than the anaconda upgrade option, with cleaner
results. But if I do that, and the UIDs used by packages at install time
change, there will be mis-owned files on the system.
For machines that share data, IMHO the proper way is to put all
accounts
with distributed files in a UID management thing like LDAP or NIS. It
As previously mentioned, that's not the right thing for system accounts. For
example, it doesn't help the above situation.
--
Matthew Miller mattdm(a)mattdm.org <
http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux ------> <
http://linux.bu.edu/>
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