Re: [gentoo-dev] Requirements for UID/GID management

[James Le Cuirot]

On Fri, 27 Jan 2017 18:37:52 -0800
Patrick McLean <chutzpah@g.o> wrote:

> I don't think we need to have stable UIDs/GIDs in the "normal" case of
> standalone users with a single Gentoo system at home. The people who
> need predictable UIDs/GIDs are the "enterprise" users or the home users
> who use things such as NFS. I work for a company that uses Gentoo, we
> have a bunch of workarounds to make sure that UIDs and GIDs are
> stable. To make something to solve our problem (and I suspect everyone
> else who cares about this), it would be sufficient to have a mechanism
> to override the default random assignment with a fixed UID/GID.
> Possibly some file in /etc/portage or in the profile (or both) that
> allows one to configure what UID/GID a user will get when the user is
> being created. One advantage of this is that user.eclass could be
> modified to support it, so we don't have to wait for a new EAPI before
> taking advantage of it.

Is this really a problem in enterprise? What are the workarounds you're
using? NFS has long had idmapd, which takes care of this problem. I
still find people shy away from NFSv4 but I've not had any trouble with
it. There's also LDAP, usually coupled with sssd these days, in which
case the users and groups are created just once on a central server.
Samba with Active Directory effectively gives you the same thing and
can also be coupled with sssd. I recently tried mixing Samba, sssd, and
NFS, which was quite fascinating and surprisingly easy thanks to
realmd. This allowed me to use NFS with Kerberos, which is something
you really need in an enterprise environment.

-- 
James Le Cuirot (chewi)
Gentoo Linux Developer