[CentOS] What is /etc/subuid ?

Wed Oct 9 20:39:53 UTC 2019
Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com>

On Wed, 9 Oct 2019 at 16:34, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 2019-10-09 14:58, Jonathan Billings wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 09, 2019 at 02:47:19PM -0500, Valeri Galtsev wrote:
> >> Could someone enlighten me about the following file:
> >>
> >> /etc/subuid
> >>
> >> ? This file appears to be owned by "setup" package. This is CentOS 7 system,
> >> and until now these files if existed were never changed. Today I have added
> >> user quite routine way, by doing
> >>
> >> /usr/sbin/groupadd -g 4500 [username]
> >> /usr/sbin/useradd -g [username] -u 4500 -c "User Name, email at domain"
> >> [username]
> >>
> >> And the file /etc/subuid changed and user was added into it:
> >>
> >> [username]:100000:65536
> >
> > I'm not sure what else it's used for, but /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid
> > are used by podman for rootless containers (i.e. you can run a
> > container without any root permissions).  subuid/subgid is used to map
> > a range of UID/GIDs to the process namespace inside the kernel.
> >
> > Some details here:
> >
> > https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux_atomic_host/7/html-single/managing_containers/index#set_up_for_rootless_containers
> >
> > It's actually pretty cool.
> >
> > So, now when accounts are created with useradd, subuids are assigned
> > to that new user.
> >
> > Unfortunately, this doesn't really work in an enterprise environment
> > when users are defined via LDAP, since no subuid/subgid entries are
> > created, but I've heard that there's an effort to make that happen in
> > the NSS layer in the future.
> >
>
> Thank you, Michael and Jonathan for your answers.
>
> I have one more question (which I probably will just answer myself by
> kickstart installing fresh new system...):
>
> Did something changed and now by default useradd command adds user in
> that file (by default without me using extra flag etc)? In other words
> is it just me or indeed the command we used since forever suddenly
> changed its behavior?
>

I believe it is a new behavior (by about a year). This file was not in
earlier versions of RHEL because my systems only seem to have it
showing up after 2018-10

> Thanks again for your insights everybody.
>
> Valeri
>
> >
>
> --
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Valeri Galtsev
> Sr System Administrator
> Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
> Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
> University of Chicago
> Phone: 773-702-4247
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.