On Mon, Jul 09, 2001 at 02:59:59PM -0400, Faheem Mitha wrote: | On Mon, 9 Jul 2001, D-Man wrote: | > On Mon, Jul 09, 2001 at 01:46:50AM -0400, Faheem Mitha wrote: | > | The most obvious problem with this is | > | | > | 1) a) My user id on SuSE is 500. My user id on Debian is 1000. Clearly I | > | will need to reconcile these. I think I would prefer to change my Debian | > | uid to 500. I'm not sure how to do this. I could try editing /etc/passwd | > | my hand, but this might be dangerous. | | > After I had read the Debian docs which say UIDs under 1000 are | > reserved for something, I changed my RH UID to 1000 (it defaulted to | > 500 too) | | I think I would rather change the Debian uid. Does anyone have good reason
It's up to you. If so, then simply s/RH/Debian/ and s/Debian/RH/ in the telling of my experience with this. Also s/RH/SuSE/ for you ;-). | to suppose that the 500 uid might be used by something else in Debian? If | not, I would be inclined to risk it. My SuSE installation is very old (2 | yrs) and there is a lot of stuff there. I would rather not fiddle with it. | In any case, can you point me to the Debian doc in question? http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/system-administrator/ch-sysadmin-users.html It says UIDs 100-999 are for system users which have not been allocated by the Debian project. and UIDs 1000-29999 are normal user accounts. | Also, would I need to change the gid for group faheem to 500 as well, or | can I leave it at 1000? I don't see why I can't leave it, so I will try | that first. You could leave it, but I recommend making them the same. | > | The SuSE /etc/passwd has as my entry | > | | > | faheem:x:500:100:Faheem Mitha:/home/faheem:/bin/bash | (user faheem, group users) | | > | The Debian /etc/passwd has | > | | > | faheem:x:1000:1000:Faheem Mitha,,,:/home/faheem:/bin/bash | (user faheem, group faheem) | | > | I think I would like to change the Debian uid. If I simply change the uid | > | faheem in /etc/passwd from 1000 to 500 then will everything be hunky-dory? | > | Or is there a better way to do this? | > | > You can simply change the UID/GID in /etc/passwd, but note that all | > files on the system have owner/group stored as an int, not as the | > name. You will need to change all files that are already owned by the | > "wrong" UID to the right one. | | Yes, sorry. Overlooked this obvious point. | | > I did this by using linuxconf on RH to remove my user, but keep home | > dir. Then create user again, but specified UID 1000. Then I used 'ls | > -lR' to find all files owned by "500" (it displays the UID because | > there is no name associated with it). Then, as root, I 'chown dman | > <file>' ('dman' is my user name). Since my UID is now 1000 it stores | > that in the file. If you forget something, like in /usr or /var, you | > will find out when you get permission errors. | > | > Try | > | > "ls -lR / | grep 500" | > | > to get a rough idea of all the files owned by the old UID (that is, | > after changing SuSE to use UID 1000). This particular usage of the | > commands will display any files that happen to have "500" in the name. | | There is a command called usermod which will change the uid and | automatically change all the files in the home directory to conform with | the new uid. Any files outside that will have to be changed manually. But Nice. | apart from /var/spool/mail/faheem, I can't think what these would be. This | is a brand new installation. Does anyone know of other files which might | have my uid on them by default? On my system (RH) I had some stuff under /var/ftpd/pub/dman and I had stuff under RH's build directory (/usr/src/redhat/RPM or something like that). Nothing terribly significant. | > Some things don't work well that way, but you could hack your way | > around it with various login scripts (it wouldn't be a pretty sight, | > BTW, but I can give some (untested) suggestions if you really want | > them). | | Sure... | | > I don't know how to tell init where to find the swap. Perhaps | > /etc/inittab tells? | | I was thinking of going back into the installation program and telling it | I wanted to use this partition as a swap space after all. Is this | possible? If you want to re-install ... after all, that's what the installer is for :-). | Otherwise, is changing things manually an option? I'm sure it is -- what isn't on a Linux system? I just don't know _how_ to change it ;-). -D
