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

[Hauke Fath]

On Sun, 27 Nov 2016 19:16:56 -0700, Leonid Isaev wrote:
> But out of curiosity, why is it difficult to change user IDs on all files? I
> assume that you control the storage? Isn't it just a chown -R away? For
> example, for our NIS passwd/shadow map we use 6-digit IDs...

Because... users have files

- on their NFS home
- on public NFS shares
- on a partition of the local harddrive (and not necessarily limited to 
one machine)
- on their home on the web server
- on their home on the mailserver
- on their home on the computing cluster

all of which makes a change of user and group id slightly more involved 
than a 'chmod -R'. Nothing that couldn't be done, mind you, given 
enough round tuits - both for me and my users. 

As I said, it would have to be either a flag day (deploy a script with 
old-new mapping to all machines involved, lock out users, shut down 
services, run script), or piecemeal change (negociate time slot with 
user, log them out, annoy other users because you have to temporarily 
disable imap and smtp services, run said script). Both would need to be 
planned, communicated and negociated, and so take more time than I have.

Cheerio,
Hauke

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