adduser question

adduser question

[Koen Kooi]

Hi,

adduser --system adds UIDs <100 to /etc/passwd, which 'update-passwd' 
will blow away, since they aren't in /usr/share/base-passwd/passwd.master

Is this intended behaviour, and if not, how should it get fixed?

regards,

Koen

Re: adduser question

[Phil Blundell]

On Sat, 2008-11-29 at 18:08 +0100, Koen Kooi wrote:
> adduser --system adds UIDs <100 to /etc/passwd, which 'update-passwd' 
> will blow away, since they aren't in /usr/share/base-passwd/passwd.master
> 
> Is this intended behaviour, and if not, how should it get fixed?

Whether or not to use passwd.master and update-passwd is clearly a
distribution choice.  Any distro which does want to use a
centrally-administered master password file should, presumably, also
configure adduser with an appropriate system UID range (for example,
100-999).  Depending on what implementation of adduser you are using,
this might just be a case of adjusting adduser.conf or it might involve
a recompile.

For distros which don't desire to use passwd.master, the right solution
is simply to refrain from installing or running update-passwd.  In this
case it doesn't matter what UID range adduser is set up for.

p.

Re: adduser question

[Koen Kooi]

On 29-11-08 19:08, Phil Blundell wrote:
> On Sat, 2008-11-29 at 18:08 +0100, Koen Kooi wrote:
>> adduser --system adds UIDs<100 to /etc/passwd, which 'update-passwd'
>> will blow away, since they aren't in /usr/share/base-passwd/passwd.master
>>
>> Is this intended behaviour, and if not, how should it get fixed?
>
> Whether or not to use passwd.master and update-passwd is clearly a
> distribution choice.  Any distro which does want to use a
> centrally-administered master password file should, presumably, also
> configure adduser with an appropriate system UID range (for example,
> 100-999).  Depending on what implementation of adduser you are using,
> this might just be a case of adjusting adduser.conf or it might involve
> a recompile.
>
> For distros which don't desire to use passwd.master, the right solution
> is simply to refrain from installing or running update-passwd.  In this
> case it doesn't matter what UID range adduser is set up for.

Thanks for the explanation, I'll have a stab at adding a proper adduser 
since we only have the busybox one in OE. The busybox adduser doesn't 
seem to support adduser.conf nor UID ranges.

regards,

Koen

Re: adduser question

[Koen Kooi]

On 29-11-08 19:27, Koen Kooi wrote:
> On 29-11-08 19:08, Phil Blundell wrote:
>> On Sat, 2008-11-29 at 18:08 +0100, Koen Kooi wrote:
>>> adduser --system adds UIDs<100 to /etc/passwd, which 'update-passwd'
>>> will blow away, since they aren't in
>>> /usr/share/base-passwd/passwd.master
>>>
>>> Is this intended behaviour, and if not, how should it get fixed?
>>
>> Whether or not to use passwd.master and update-passwd is clearly a
>> distribution choice. Any distro which does want to use a
>> centrally-administered master password file should, presumably, also
>> configure adduser with an appropriate system UID range (for example,
>> 100-999). Depending on what implementation of adduser you are using,
>> this might just be a case of adjusting adduser.conf or it might involve
>> a recompile.
>>
>> For distros which don't desire to use passwd.master, the right solution
>> is simply to refrain from installing or running update-passwd. In this
>> case it doesn't matter what UID range adduser is set up for.
>
> Thanks for the explanation, I'll have a stab at adding a proper adduser
> since we only have the busybox one in OE. The busybox adduser doesn't
> seem to support adduser.conf nor UID ranges.

That's a no-go, the 'adduser' package is written in perl. Next stop: 
evaluate useradd from the 'passwd' package.

regards,

Koen