[SLE] nobody has negative uid

Bill Wright writes:

A friend has an older version of Suse running kernel 2.0.35.

Besides other problems, I noticed that the nobody user has a user id number of -2 and a group number of -2 also. The group exists and the only member is root. The home dir is set as /tmp Is this normal for an older version of SuSE? The newer versions are user id 65534 and grp id of 65534 with home dir /var/lib/nobody

-2 expressed as a 16 bit unsigned value is equal to 65534. Some app is probably not printing it correctly.