Description of problem: It appears that the documented restriction Similarly, if the username already exists in an external user database such as NIS or LDAP, useradd will deny the user account creation request. is applied even when attempting to create a "system" userid. This is problematic because it is *necessary* to have a local entry in /etc/passwd for any userid that is referenced by name during early system boot, before the system is ready to communicate with an external NIS/LDAP server. This turns out to be the root cause of the failure described in bug #894750. Presumably the same issue could occur with other services besides mysql; also consider that the need for such early references has gotten a lot larger with the introduction of temp-directory recreation and the general lack of predictability of system boot order in systemd. I realize that creating a local entry risks inconsistency, but perhaps it could be done anyway for system UIDs? Or at least, done if the remote entry matches what is being requested?
I don't think that creating local entry that would conflict with a remote one is appropriate, but creating it in the case it matches the remote one would be probably mostly harmless.
Another possibility that I thought of later is to provide some sort of --override switch that would tell useradd to add the local entry without checking for remote conflicts. The main use-case for this would be RPM install scripts such as mysql's. (Lennart seemed to be suggesting that this should be tied to the --system option, but probably a separate option is better.) I'm not sure how much weight should really be put on the idea that useradd is preventing problems by having a rigid policy here. There are plenty of ways that we can get into a situation where there are local/remote conflicts despite that check. For instance, suppose one installs mysql-server before rather than after configuring the box to know about the remote NIS service.
For creating a conflicting entry such --override or --force switch would be necessary - just tying it to --system is not right. We will need to get an upstream acceptance first though.
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