Re: Reserving uid/gids for specific packages -- Revisited

[Bill Crawford <rpm billemon org uk>]

On Wed, 20 Mar 2002, Chris Ricker wrote:

> On Thu, 21 Mar 2002, Bill Crawford wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 20 Mar 2002, Chris Ricker wrote:
> > 
> > > synchronizing names but not UIDs / GIDs is going to pose problems when doing 
> > > NFS between systems with different IDs but same names.  ditto for backup on 
> > > one and restore on the next....
> > 
> >  If you're planning a large installation, it's not a big thing to plan
> > things like what user names and IDs to use.
> 
> Right, but if you're doing LDAP / NIS / rsync you're probably going to have
> established names as well.  For example, the Red Hat RPMs use group
> "postdrop" for postdrop, while I use group "maildrop" here for it; that's
> something that was established long before RH put postfix in Raw Hide, and
> it ain't going to change now just to deal with my RH machines (I'll fix the
> RH boxes instead, particularly since I roll my own postfix RPMs anyway)....

 That was kind of my point ... we have an established scheme where I
work and there's no way it would get changed to suit a registry.

> *shrug* A list of names only strikes me as being even less useful than a
> list of name:id pairs (and that's not very useful either, though I do think
> it's a good idea to collect vendor's defaults some place like rpm.org as a
> reference), since it won't help little sites (see problem above) and bigger
> shops will just ignore it anyway in favor of their own practice.  This 
> really isn't a problem rpm can / should solve.

 Totally agree.

 I do think a list of names would be more harmless than an attempt to
standardise the numbers; that would be more useful, in fact, since we
can count on tar/cpio to do the required stuff behind the scenes if
the named match, the actual UID matters very little for backup, which
Chris was questioning.  For NFS sharing of course it will matter, but
again that's the sort of thing you plan ahead on; typically you build
your own packages and take time to build a good config for packages
that will share data across filesystems like that.

 In any case if you're sharing mail spools over NFS you're going to
have the same OS on the servers, generally, probably the same version.

> later,
> chris