Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 59299
RFE: A centraliced registry/clearance database of [system] UIDs/GIDs
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:01 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98) Description of problem: It would be nice if the Re Hat people maintaned and published a central registry of the fixed GIDs/UIDs used by the packages that need them for the supported RHL version as well as accepting reservations request from 3rd. party rpm package builders In this way the RH staff and 3rd. party packagers could avoid UIDs/GUIDs clashes both for current and future versions of RHL. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Packager/developer Alice is rpm-packaging foo package 2. foo needs to use a unique UID in the system 3. Alice chooses UID 25 that is below the system uid limit and published the package that created the foouser in the preinstall script. 4. Users complain that the foo rpm is clashing with the 'named' system user created by the RHL bind packages 5. So, Alice now greps all the install scripts in the RHL CDs for occurences of useradd to be safe. Now chooses the UID 89 because it is not used by any RHL package and publishes a new rpm package of foo with this modification. 6. Users start complaining again because UID 89 is used by the very popular rpm packages of Postfix maintained by Simon J. Mudd 7. Arghh ! Actual Results: Alice gets crazy and abandon the idea of rpm packaging foo Expected Results: If Alice could read a web page at www.redhat.com to find a unused UID and then start a process to 'reserve' it this problem could be avoided. Additional info:
We have a list of uids/gids that are used in the range 0-100 (might be 0-500, but most of the uid's/gid's used by Red Hat are < 100) that changes only slowly. An everythig install will show what we use, or post a bug against the setup package asking for a copy of the list. A full-blown uid/gid mapping database is outside of rpm's scope, and possibly outside the scope of the Red Hat distro itself., as we have no control (or desire to control) choice of uid's and gid's.