[comp.unix.xenix] How many uids and gids are allowed in SCO Xenix?

chaiklin@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Seth Chaiklin) (06/28/90)

I am runing SCO Xenix/386 2.3.1.  I am curious about whether there
is a upper limit on uids and also a upper limit on group ids?
How do people handle the growing number of uids? Do you fill in
the lower values or just keep adding to the end?  Does it matter?
Thanks, Seth Chaiklin

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syd@DSI.COM (Syd Weinstein) (06/28/90)

chaiklin@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Seth Chaiklin) writes:
>I am runing SCO Xenix/386 2.3.1.  I am curious about whether there
>is a upper limit on uids and also a upper limit on group ids?
>How do people handle the growing number of uids? Do you fill in
>the lower values or just keep adding to the end?  Does it matter?
SCO, like most Unix's uses 16 bits for the uid and gid.  Thus
the upper limit is 16 bits.  However, when you start to network,
you will find some bugs re negative uid's in many Unix's so the
practical limit is 32767, not 65535 for the upper limit.

Since uid's and gid's should (must if NFS is used) be consistent
network wide on you LAN's, perhaps some very large sites might
find that constraining.  However, for most sites, I would think
that approximately 32000 uids and gid's is sufficient.
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nanook@rwing.UUCP (Robert Dinse) (06/30/90)

In article <1990Jun28.031638.15931@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>, chaiklin@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Seth Chaiklin) writes:
> 
> I am runing SCO Xenix/386 2.3.1.  I am curious about whether there
> is a upper limit on uids and also a upper limit on group ids?
> How do people handle the growing number of uids? Do you fill in
> the lower values or just keep adding to the end?  Does it matter?
> Thanks, Seth Chaiklin
> 
     I've done some experimenting on that very subject and found 30,000
to be the limit (not 32767 or some sensical boundry). Although you can
go this high, to have more about 990 users you have to create seperate
/usr or /usr2 or whatever directories, otherwise mkdir blows up.

     Never ran into a group id problem so don't know what/if max values
apply there.

pgd@bbt.se (P.Garbha) (07/02/90)

In article <106@rwing.UUCP> nanook@rwing.UUCP (Robert Dinse) writes:
>In article <1990Jun28.031638.15931@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>, chaiklin@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Seth Chaiklin) writes:
>> 
>> I am runing SCO Xenix/386 2.3.1.  I am curious about whether there
>> is a upper limit on uids and also a upper limit on group ids?
>
>     I've done some experimenting on that very subject and found 30,000
>to be the limit (not 32767 or some sensical boundry). 

In file /usr/include/sys/param.h you have the line:
#define	MAXUID	60000		/* max user id */
That would get me to assume the highest uid is 60000, not 30000. The
setuid() call makes an explicit test for this, and returns EINVAL if
greater. chown does not check anything, and you can have uid's up to
65535

cudcv@warwick.ac.uk (Rob McMahon) (07/03/90)

In article <1990Jun28.165234.23491@DSI.COM> syd@DSI.COM writes:
>SCO, like most Unix's uses 16 bits for the uid and gid.  Thus the upper limit
>is 16 bits.  However, when you start to network, you will find some bugs re
>negative uid's in many Unix's so the practical limit is 32767, not 65535 for
>the upper limit.

On the other hand there used to be bugs in assorted utilities with [ug]id's as
low as 2-3000.  I can't speak for SCO Unix, and we can't get the source these
days, so I can't see whether they've all been chased down in the systems that
did have these problems.

I've seen `lastcomm' dumping core, `ls' taking forever, and `ps' printing
numbers instead of usernames, because of static uid->username mapping tables
sized at compile-time and indexed by uid.  (lastcomm ignored the problem, I
think ls kept one entry cached outside 0-2000, and ps just punted.)  I'm sure
this was true in 4.1BSD and SunOS 2.0.

Rob
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