Hi, what are Arch's conventions for the numeric ranges of system (package) user and grop IDs? And can the range be limited? I am working up to switching a few dozen Debian clients to Arch. They have user homes on NFS, and authenticate through NIS. So far, nis distributes user and group IDs > 500, making anything lower a local / system ID. After installing Arch, I see % awk -F: '{ if ( $3 > 500 ) print }' < /etc/passwd systemd-journal-remote:x:999:999:systemd Journal Remote:/:/sbin/nologin systemd-journal-upload:x:998:998:systemd Journal Upload:/:/sbin/nologin systemd-coredump:x:997:997:systemd Core Dumper:/:/sbin/nologin % awk -F: '{ if ( $3 > 500 ) print }' < /etc/group systemd-journal-remote:x:999: systemd-journal-upload:x:998: systemd-coredump:x:997: lightdm:x:620: % which collide with NIS users.[1] My question: Do Arch packages come with hardcoded numerical user/group IDs? If not, is there a way to limit the numeric range of system IDs? I guess I would still have to reinstall the distribution. The alternative - a flag day to change NIS user and group IDs as well as on 4 TB file storage and local storage on 50 client machines - wouldn't be pretty. And I don't really have the time, either. Cheerio, hauke [1] lightdm appears to be a pathological case: It hardcodes both name and ID of its user and group, and installation plows on witjout flagging an error even after failing to register the user ID. -- The ASCII Ribbon Campaign Hauke Fath () No HTML/RTF in email Institut für Nachrichtentechnik /\ No Word docs in email TU Darmstadt Respect for open standards Ruf +49-6151-16-21344