phil@amd70.UUCP (Phil Ngai) (11/11/83)
I was thinking it would be really neat to give people UIDs which were
the same as their employee number, and GID corresponding to their
department number. Guaranteed existence and uniqueness, etc. Does
anyone else think this is a good or bad idea? It wouldn't work for
companies with more than 2^16 employees, but that shouldn't be a major
limitation, I guess.
One problem I have seen is that "ls" has a limit of 2048 wired into it.
Before I fix this, has anyone else increased the limit? It's not just
changing a constant because there is an array which has 2048 elements
in it, and the idea of allocating 65536 elements seems wasteful.
--
Phil Ngai (408) 988-7777 {ucbvax|decwrl|ihnp4|allegra}!amd70!phildavid@varian.UUCP (11/14/83)
We've been using project numbers for group ID's without much problems;
however we don't use group functions all that often. But I'd like to
warn you against using a numeric login name - we've had problems on our VAX
with a few of those. This applies to 4.1bsd - I don't know what 4.2bsd
does:
1) getty or login ignores numeric ID's at first; we have to type some
garbage letters, get "incorrect login", then type in the numeric ID.
2) In our situation, the numeric login name does not match the UID
(e.g. user '401' is UID 47). This has caused problems after using
the chown command, which changed ownership to UID 401, not 47, and
it took a while to figure out what was going on: there is no user
with UID 401, so ls listings appear identical in both cases.
David Brown (415) 945-2199
Varian Instruments 2700 Mitchell Dr. Walnut Creek, Ca. 94598
{ihnp4,tektronix,sytek,dual}!zehntel!varian!david
{amd70,fortune}!varian!david
...!decvax!sytek!zehntel!varian!david
...!ucbvax!menlo70!sytek!zehntel!varian!davidhgc%ardc@sri-unix.UUCP (11/14/83)
From: Howard G. Corneilson (MISD WA-Team) <hgc@ardc> Unfortunatly we use Social-Security-Numbers so our employee numbers are rather large. But we did increase our ls to handle 30000 UID's and 3000 GID's (or in that range anyhow). We experienced little problem, although the number of users we have is small. We anticipate a rather large user base over a number of machines and wanted to keep all UID's unique. We are not sure how our change will work out in the long run. (We have a VAX 780 w/ 8M memory) -------- Howard G. Corneilson (MISD WAD) <hgc@ardc>
chris@umcp-cs.UUCP (11/16/83)
Yes, all-numeric login names are not good since all system utilities
tend to look to see if an argument is all digits, and if so, doesn't
do a login name lookup. Useful for bringing up a system with a
scrogged /etc/passwd, maybe.
Getty ignores all-numeric names because they have neither an uppercase
letter nor a lowercase letter. That's a bug in getty.
--
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci
UUCP: {seismo,allegra,brl-bmd}!umcp-cs!chris
CSNet: chris@umcp-cs ARPA: chris.umcp-cs@CSNet-Relaydudek@utcsrgv.UUCP (Gregory Dudek) (11/17/83)
-- Aside from the practical problems with numeric logins, there is the human factor. Numeric logins are UGLY! Among the drawbacks are the fact that they are hard to remember, and impersonal. I was hoping that we are slowly moving away from the days when all our machine readable identifiers had to be numeric and we had to type in code in binary. Granted, using alphabetic IDs leaves the problem of coming up with unique ones, but at worst, you could select them (or let users select them) from a dictionary of available words. Gregory Dudek. ..utcsrgv!dudek P.S. Having social insurance numbers for logins sounds consistent with having all your executables numbered prog0001 through prog9999 and error messages like "Abort: I78551".
phil@amd70.UUCP (Phil Ngai) (11/20/83)
HEY! I am not talking about using numbers as logins. I was asking about
assignment of UIDS, which are a different kind of animal. Using numbers
as logins is so retarded I can't believe anyone could think of it.
--
Phil Ngai (408) 988-7777 {ucbvax|decwrl|ihnp4|allegra}!amd70!philpreece@uicsl.UUCP (11/24/83)
#R:amd70:-408800:uicsl:12500016:000:479 uicsl!preece Nov 23 08:04:00 1983 This is fascinating. The original request said nothing whatever about using numeric logins, just user and group IDs matching the company's existing numeric identifiers. All the respondents, however, talked about the virtues/failings of using numeric logins. Don't people read what they're responding to? Just to join the stream, though, I don't see anything horrible in numeric identifiers; I still think fondly of myself as [1516,317] from my eight years as a DEC-10 user.