Adduser devel - May 2009 - Bug#243929: adduser: Reserve specific UIDs for users that will be created at a later time

Hilko Bengen wrote...
> If the maintainers think that this feature might be useful, I promise
> to provide a patch.
As I was looking for a solution to have unified system ids and Hilko
was no longer interested in that topic I took the opportunity and
hacked some stuff together.  Attached you''ll find a patch against
adduser 3.110 that adds a "UID_POOL" and "GID_POOL" option
for a file
containing the pre- defined user or group name and an preferred id,
separated by a colon. Using one file for both user and group ids is
possible and probably a good idea.  The whole concept is disabled by
default.

While this works for me I am not very happy about it since it
completely ignores the barrier between "regular user" and "system
user".  Therefore it''s the administrator''s task to add
useful values,
and there''s no protection against the linear id search stealing ids
that are reserved in the pool.

To do:
* Documentation (surprise)
* A sample adduser-pool.conf
* Alter adduser.conf to add a number space for the pool, or
  at least suggest this.

Other ideas:
* This mechanism could be enhanced to pre-load the entire
  getpw information for an account to be created. Perhaps a cool idea
  but appearently there was no demand for it yet, and larger
  installations probably prefer $LDAP for that.
* While the functionality provided by adduser only applies to newly
  created users, we can expect an administrator might wish to renumber
  existing accounts.  We could provide a list of todos and caveats for
  this, but it will always remain incomplete and ugly.  The scripts I
  wrote for that task shall never see the light.

Thanks for your consideration.

    Christoph



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