Bug#25882: PROPOSED] u/gid 100 should be statically allocated
> On Sun, May 30, 1999 at 05:35:56PM +0100, Julian Gilbey wrote:
> > > I had cause to look in /etc/passwd recently, and found that several
> > > system accounts had inherited my gid, 100:
> > > sync:*:4:100:sync:/bin:/bin/sync
> > > games:*:5:100:games:/usr/games:
> > > man:*:6:100:man:/var/catman:
> > Or alternatively allocate one of the unused groups in the 0-99 range
> > for this explicit purpose if a group other than `nogroup' is required.
>
> Please see the discussion in http://www.debian.org/Bugs/db/25/25882-b.html#m5
>
> In summary, changing this group is a risky thing to do on all the
> Debian systems currently installed (it requires messing with people's
> filesystems); the current behaviour has been standard "forever" on Debian
> (and hasn't resulted in a slew of bug reports); and having a variable
> group number requires changes to other packages.
>
> I'd appreciate it if you (or someone else who'd rather an alternate
> solution) address the problems outlined at the above url at any rate.
A question on this one:
There are only three users in /etc/passwd which have a gid of 100.
The gid of "users" in /etc/group could probably be changed by a local
admin without too many problems; the /etc/adduser.conf file would need
modification, but anyone playing with this issue could reasonably be
expected to figure this out. (This is sysadmin stuff, not general
user stuff.)
So to what extent do these three users (man, sync and games) actually
need to be in the users group? Do they ever use their gids? Why
could they not be given group nogroup in future? Then if the sysadmin
were to change the gid of "users", there would be no interference or
problems caused.
The original bug report talked about changing the gids of these three
users, nothing more major than that. And this would not need to be a
retroactive change: as long as these three users don't *need* to be in
users, they shouldn't be.
Actually, I don't understand after some more thinking about it why
they are in users in the first place. I also don't understand what
harm it could cause.
Not even 2 cents' worth!
Julian
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://www.debian.org/~jdg
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