Bug 958842 - Please consider changing ID allocation of system accounts not to skip holes
Summary: Please consider changing ID allocation of system accounts not to skip holes
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED DEFERRED
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: shadow-utils
Version: rawhide
Hardware: Unspecified
OS: Unspecified
unspecified
unspecified
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Iker Pedrosa
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2013-05-02 13:57 UTC by Miloslav Trmač
Modified: 2021-06-03 10:54 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2021-06-03 10:54:47 UTC
Type: Bug
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)


Links
System ID Private Priority Status Summary Last Updated
Github shadow-maint shadow pull 144 0 None closed WIP: Introduce MAX_ID_HOLE_SIZE setting 2020-10-05 09:27:38 UTC

Description Miloslav Trmač 2013-05-02 13:57:02 UTC
When useradd is choosing an UID for a system account (what about other tools, and GIDs?), it first tries to use (min(existing_system_uid)-1), and only if that ID is outside of the SYS_UID_* range, it tries to use other values in "holes".

This can lead to using surprisingly low values, potentially conflicting with static ID allocation.  See bug 924501 comment 9 for a real-world scenario.

Would it make sense to use the highest free UID in the SYS_UID_* range instead?

Comment 1 Tomas Mraz 2013-05-02 14:15:14 UTC
I suppose the reasoning behind the current algorithm is that if accounts get deleted, using the holes could assign UID of previously existing account to the new account. If there were strain files/directories of the old account bad things could potentially happen. Perhaps we could add some kind of heuristic such as choosing an UID from the first gap larger than X (how big the X should be though?) looking from the top of the SYS_UID range.

Comment 2 Fedora End Of Life 2015-01-09 18:01:38 UTC
This message is a notice that Fedora 19 is now at end of life. Fedora 
has stopped maintaining and issuing updates for Fedora 19. It is 
Fedora's policy to close all bug reports from releases that are no 
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Comment 3 Iker Pedrosa 2021-06-03 10:54:47 UTC
This BZ has been evaluated and we assessed that it is a valuable
request to keep in the backlog and address it at some point in future.
Currently we have no capacity nor will have in the foreseeable future to
work on it.

In such a situation keeping it in the backlog is misleading and setting the wrong
expectation that we will be able to address it. Unfortunately we will not.
To reflect this we are closing this BZ.

If you disagree with the decision please reopen or create a new BZ. However this
does not guarantee that the request will not be closed during the triage as we
are currently applying much more rigor to what we actually can accomplish in the
foreseeable future. Contributions and collaboration in the upstream community and
CentOS Stream is always welcome!

Thank you for understanding
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Identity Management Team


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