Use allocated UID/GID for opensrf in Debian/Ubuntu

Bug #1549536 reported by Jeff Davis
10
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Evergreen
New
Undecided
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Bug Description

Last year, our sysadmin successfully requested allocation of a standard UID/GID for the opensrf user/group in Debian and Ubuntu:

https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/users/cjwatson/base-passwd.git/commit/?id=9c4d2c39bfa63ba70109365e88d6be089f62daa2

UID/GID 64050 is now officially reserved for opensrf in those distros. It would make sense to take advantage of this during the OpenSRF/Evergreen install process.

Revision history for this message
Jason Stephenson (jstephenson) wrote :

I can testify that Debian 9 will not allow you to make a user named opensrf during installation.

After installation if you create the user normally, it does not get the reserved id automatically. In order to use the reserved id, you have to specify it when creating the user.

If you add the opensrf user as a system user, it still does not get the reserved id. In this case, you also have to specify the reserved id.

Since this prevents my usual shortcut of creating the opensrf user during installation, I don't see what advantage this gives us. I now have to do 1 of two things after creating a different user during installation:

1. rename the different user to opensrf
2. create the opensrf user fresh

This adds a step or two to setting up test virtual machines.

Those of us who have systems set up with NFS have to use specific user ids for the opensrf user. If we're expected to switch to a new id, this means changing that user id across all of our systems. Fortunately, this only prevents use of that name during installation. It does not, yet, force the user id created with that name after the fact.

Finally, I don't recall any community discussion of this move. It might have been nice if some public discussion had happened prior to the request being made as this potentially affects all of us.

Revision history for this message
Jason Stephenson (jstephenson) wrote :

I want to add that this does not appear to affect Ubuntu. I've had no trouble making the opensrf user during installation on Ubuntu 16.04 or Ubuntu 18.04. I've not tried on Devuan (a Debian derivative), but we don't support Devuan, yet.

tags: added: installation
tags: added: supportscripts
removed: installation
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