[arch-general] Arch pkg user and group IDs?

[Hauke Fath]

On Sun, 27 Nov 2016 15:49:33 -0500, Eli Schwartz via arch-general wrote:
>> [login.defs] might actually help, depending on how well it is 
>> enforced. Thanks!
> 
> "enforced"? It is the configuration file for useradd. Anything not
> explicitly hardcoded in the UID/GID database (or hardcoded but not in
> the database) 

... like lightdm?

> will respect the useradd configuration (when you reinstall
> Arch and all those users are created from scratch again).
> 
> Although really, whatever distribution was running on your NFS server
> shouldn't be configuring for users with UIDs below 1000 -- a network is
> exactly the wrong place to be allowing UIDs that can clash with other
> distros' UID reservations.

Well, there's 
<http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/101313/what-are-the-dangers-of-creating-a-normal-user-with-uid-500> 
which discusses OS distributions' conventions of where to start 
non-system uids/gids.

The installation in question is about 13 years old, and it has been 
merged a while back with a database that was even older. So the uid 
1000 border that Arch uses (and also Debian, according to the link 
above, although at least Debian 7 is counting upward, and the highest 
system uid on our systems is 118), is by no means universal.

I guess the average distro maintainer doesn't work in a larger, 
historically grown network... 

> It might not be a bad idea to report that as a bug.

It was an administrative decision, back more than ten years ago, when 
500 IDs appeared to be enough for everyone.  ;)

[
systemd-journal-remote:x:999:
systemd-journal-upload:x:998:
systemd-coredump:x:997:
]

> AFAIK those systemd users/groups are generated by sysusers.d

Aahh! Thanks for the missing puzzle piece. I guess I can find my way 
from there.

Cheerio,
Hauke

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