Mailing-List: contact cygwin-developers-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm
List-Subscribe: <mailto:cygwin-developers-subscribe AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Archive: <http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin-developers/>
List-Post: <mailto:cygwin-developers AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Help: <mailto:cygwin-developers-help AT cygwin DOT com>, <http://sources.redhat.com/ml/#faqs>
Sender: cygwin-developers-owner AT cygwin DOT com
Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin-developers AT cygwin DOT com
Message-ID: <3E6780A9.F1F32899@ieee.org>
Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2003 12:08:57 -0500
From: "Pierre A. Humblet" <Pierre DOT Humblet AT ieee DOT org>
X-Accept-Language: en,pdf
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: cygwin-developers AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: uid > 64k
References: <3E675F8D DOT 414B9BBD AT ieee DOT org> <20030306164822 DOT GT1193 AT cygbert DOT vinschen DOT de>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Mar 06, 2003 at 09:47:41AM -0500, Pierre A. Humblet wrote:
> > Corinna,
> >
> > there was again a report of uid > 64k.
> >
> > Why don't we patch mkpasswd to keep uids below 64k until Cygwin
> > switches to uid32 ?
> 
> How do you fold the ids into 64K?  You never know if you're already
> overwriting another id.
 
Agreed. However most passwd files have a lot fewer entries than 64k.
Thus I was thinking that randomizing the entries above 64k into the
range 10000->64k (to avoid local and special users) should succeed
with high probability. At worst there might be aliasing and ls -l 
might show some incorrect names, in which case the file must be 
edited by hand.

Doing nothing is guaranteed to produce failures (e.g getpwuid( getuid()))
which will also force manual edits. 

pierre