On Sun, 2011-07-03 at 19:25 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote: > On Sun, 2011-07-03 at 14:46 -0700, JD wrote: > > I think you have exposed a very interesting problem. > > It would be interesting if the problem hadn't been known about for the > last 20 or 30 years, i.e. since Unix systems started being networked in > large numbers. > > This is exactly the reason Sun created NIS (formerly called Yellow > Pages). Using NIS a set of machines can keep user ids and other info in > sync. Nowadays LDAP is also used for this, as is Active Directory in the > Windows world. > > Unfortunately for people with only a couple of machines on their home > network, these are usually too much trouble to set up, so the only > solution is manually to keep UIDs/GIDs consistent across machines. > > poc Yeah... NIS would be a bit overkill for a single user case. I used to play on multiple distros (a *lot*), split right down the middle between Debian- and RPM-based systems. The solution to this is pretty simple for a single-user (or very few user) system. Every time you create a user on any system, specify the UID & GID explicitly, and always use UIDs/GIDs <= 1000. Fedora doesn't care if you have a UID much higher than 500, but Debian does care if your UID is lower than 1000 (in fact, the man page for "useradd" on Fedora even says that 1000 is the standard, Fedora just doesn't actually follow that). So an example for me could be: useradd -u 1001 -g 1001 i-yagami So long as I use that same command to add myself to every system, no conflicts occur anywhere. On the other hand, if I add a new system and just enter "useradd i-yagami" (or use a GUI tool to add a user without declaring the uid/gid manually) then the account will either have a uid and gid of 1000 or 500, but either way my real /home/i-yagami folder will not be the place my new, mistaken home gets created and the permissions of the real home folder from within the new system will simply say 1001:1001. I don't really like the idea of passing the shadow and passwd files around between systems or doing a lot of pipeline magic to fix inconsistencies between such files across distros. The problem is that different distros/systems handle user creation differently and you can be unexpectedly missing things or having weird minor trouble with your shared home folder. So going through the explicit "useradd -u # -g # [name]" process was the easiest way for me and its anything but a burden when dealing with a handful of users. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
