One of the advantages of doing an OS upgrade (instead of a new install) is it looks at your existing passwd file and keeps the old UIDs. But I don't trust upgrades, I install into new partitions and merge in the customisations of the old machine. This gives me a new passwd file sometimes with changed UIDs. Then I have the messy job of changing them back and finding any new owned files to change them too. It's a big machine (800 Gig) to run this command from root: find . -user <old-UID> -exec chown <username> {} ; Note this is only a problem for system entries (dhcpd etc.) real users have UIDs above 1000 and can be added later simply by appending that part of the old passwd file. I do have to keep system UIDs consistent as I have multiple machines running different steppings of Suse and sharing files. 3 questions: Is there a way of feeding the old password file into the install to ensure existing UIDs are preserved? Do the Suse UIDs depend on which packages are installed? Could I build things from a published, reliable list "These are the numbers that Suse will always choose"? michaelj -- Michael James michael.james@csiro.au System Administrator voice: 02 6246 5040 CSIRO Bioinformatics Facility fax: 02 6246 5166