Re: ID Numbering in Group and Passwd

I can see 2 ways to resolve the issue from a Fedora development perspective.

1. Similar to the suggestion you have put forward below - Change UID_MAX to say 40,000 and change GID_MIN to 40,001. That will stop uids and gids from colliding and is a pretty easy solution to implement from a change perspective. Raises a problem tho that what UID will the 39,501th user have? We cant just increase the UID_MAX as there'll be groups using the numbers above 40,000 and we'll run into the same problem as we're having now. Chances are you'll be using NIS or LDAP if you've got this many users but its probably not good practice to be assuming the user management practices of the masses.

2. Change the useradd / luseradd code to find the lowest unique uid / gid combination when creating any new user. This is harder to implement because it involves rewriting the underlying code of useradd but it is a more complete and scalable solution because you can change the UID, GID MIN, MAX values to whatever and it'll still work and users will always have their uid equal to their gid. I tend to favaour this solution because of it's completeness and scalability.

Robin / Others - what do you think? Depending on the general consensus I'll probably submit a feature enhancement request.

In response to Tim and Justin - you'd hope that the CLI and GUI tools doing the same thing would be using the same underlying code / library to achieve it so there is consistency across the 2 tools but it looks like theyre not :o(

Thanks all for your responses.

Dave