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Re: Cleaning up group identities

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Lars Poulsen <lars@beagle-ears.com> writes:
> It seems that there may never be a completely clean solution to
> this, because when you build a new system, it sets up it range of UIDS
> and GIDS for system services, and by necessity, it also creates
> at least one "user" account. Then, when you port in the user
> partitions from the old system, you need to bring in the parts
> of /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/group and related configuration
> items that match the files in those imported file systems,
> including the "additional users" field in /etc/group.

This is the point at which you have to reassign UIDs/GIDs, of course.

> Part of the immediate cleanup will be moving old user-ids out of
> the 500-999 range. When doing that, it would be good to also align
> the UIDs and GIDs of the users. (Which means setting aside a range
> groups like "family", "friends", "coworkers" that do not have a
> unique user associated.)
>
> It seems to me, that the best solution would be to provide a hook
> in the installation process to bring in the old passwd and group
> files to merge them in.
>
> And by the way, is there a canonical list of "preferred" values
> for system service UID and GID?

AFAIK there is not (and cannot be) any such thing, at least at the
global level: system UIDs/GIDs vary between distributions and in some
cases are dynamic.

-- 
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

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Cleaning up group identities Lars Poulsen <lars@beagle-ears.com> - 2025-12-31 15:32 +0000
  Re: Cleaning up group identities Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2025-12-31 16:56 +0000
  Re: Cleaning up group identities jayjwa <jayjwa@atr2.ath.cx.invalid> - 2025-12-31 13:20 -0500
  Re: Cleaning up group identities Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-12-31 21:03 +0000
  Re: Cleaning up group identities Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2026-01-01 16:03 +0000
    Re: Cleaning up group identities - SOLVED Lars Poulsen <lars@beagle-ears.com> - 2026-01-01 16:42 +0000

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