[CentOS] Determine next UID number
Stephen Harris
lists at spuddy.org
Wed Oct 13 23:01:29 UTC 2010
On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 05:45:15PM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On 10/13/2010 5:24 PM, Stephen Harris wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 04:47:45PM -0400, John Kennedy wrote:
> >> the next user even though some dim bulb gave a use a UID of 4294967294 (how
> >> the hell that user can log in with a UID out of range is beyond me unless it
> >> gets truncated)...
> >
> > Who says 4294967294 is out of range?
> 64-bit, I presume? Does your /var/log/lastlog look pretty big after
Nope; 32bit CentOS 5.5
> that person logs in or did that get fixed?
lastlog is a sparse file. How it looks and how big it is are two
different things.
I'm not saying there aren't problems with uids that high (pwconv, for
example, truncates to 2^32-1) but the number _is_ in range.
I've seen this before on systems where "nobody" was represented as
"-2" (eg from NIS maps on old SunOS 4 systems) rather than 65534.
When those maps were transferred to systems with 32bit uids then they
became 4294967294. Funky stuff :-)
Heh, the kernel Documentation/highuid.txt file discussing 32bit uids is
dated January 2000. I guess it's a little out of date, now :-)
--
rgds
Stephen
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