On Friday 07 November 2003 12:35 pm, Don Walters wrote: > >On a lot of systems these days you can run "vipw" to edit the password > > file and change the UID. > >vipw will update the shadow password file too (if you use shadow > >passwords). > > I have vipw (I'm running RH9) but it seems to be just a incantation of the > vi editor that takes me through the files and allows me to edit them. > /etc/shadow doesn't seem to have any uid/gid in there, but I could be > wrong. > > I think I smell an enhancement to vpopmail just waiting to happen. > Wouldn't it be nice if I could specify the uid/gid when I run --configure?? > I mean, that's kind of a grand assumption that every single user > everywhere who installs vpopmail will always want the uid/gid to be 89.
The configure script looks up the vpopmail user and gets the uid/gid. Since there was no portable way to look up the uid/gid, configure actually compiles and runs a C program that uses the portable getpwnam() call. So whatever the vpopmail user/group is, configure will figure it out and put it in the headers. The only problem is if you configure it on one machine and then install the compiled binaries on another machine that has a different uid/gid for vpopmail/vchkpw. The other alternative is to have the vpopmail library look up the uid/gid from /etc/passwd every time a program runs that uses the vpopmail lib. For efficency, that lookup is done once at compile time. Ken Jones
