[Fedora-directory-users] posixgroup name lookups

[George Holbert]

>
> -sh-3.2$ id -gn
> id: cannot find name for group ID 2000
> 2000
...
> Instead, we added posixgroup as an objectclass to the users.  Is this a
> reasonable way to go about this?

Not really...
id is asking your name service "what is the group name for gid 2000".
You have no groups defined in your name service with that gid.
The most common way to address this is to add a posixGroup object in 
your LDAP directory with gid 2000, and whatever name (cn) you like.
I would suggest doing this for each account's primary gid.




John A. Sullivan III wrote:
> Hello, all.  We're trying to move all our user access control to DS
> including file system rights management and thus group management.
> We've hit a few problems and would like to share how we've gotten around
> them both for documentation and so someone with more experience can tell
> us if we are going about this the wrong way.
>
> The first problem we hit was the various hosts could not resolve the
> gidnumber to a name:
> -sh-3.2$ id -gn
> id: cannot find name for group ID 2000
> 2000
>
> We noticed in the access query that the hosts were looking for
> posixgroups:
> SRCH base="dc=ssiservices,dc=biz" scope=2
> filter="(&(objectClass=posixGroup)(gidNumber=2000))" attrs="cn
> userPassword memberUid uniqueMember gidNumber"
>
> The problem comes with user's initial groups which are typically named
> after the uid.  Since we had not created these explicitly as DS groups
> but rather simply assigned the gidnumber in the posixaccount's gidnumber
> attribute, there was no posixgroup to seek.
>
> I suppose the ideal way to address this is the change the query to look
> for a posixgroup or a posixaccount.  I do not see how one does this.
> Instead, we added posixgroup as an objectclass to the users.  Is this a
> reasonable way to go about this?
>
> Then we hit our next problem.  The user's initial group is usually the
> same as their uid, e.g., user bsmith belongs to group bsmith. However,
> the query is looking for cn rather than uid.  I suppose this is because
> a posixgroup, as opposed to a user, does not have a uid but does have a
> cn.  This turned up as a problem where we wanted to control the umask in
> bashrc which uses logic such as:
> if [ $UID -gt 99 ] && [ "`id -gn`" = "`id -un`" ]; then
>         umask 002
> id -un would return bsmith but id -gn would return something like Brian
> Smith.
>
> Thus, we will need to make it a user creation procedure to override the
> cn to be the same as the uid rather than FirstName LastName.  Is this
> the correct approach? Thanks - John
>