As I recall, the new 2.6 kernel supports up to (IIRC) 4 billion users, instead of the previous 65,000, that we all found so limiting. ;-) I guess they just wanted to make room for more system IDs. John Pettigrew wrote:
Can anyone tell my why SUSE changed the default numbers used for userids? Previously (7.3, 8.1 and 8.2, at least - these are the versions I've used before), userids started at 500 and incremented from there. This meant that, as long as I created my users on a new system in the right order, I could simply copy across the files from the old system and all the permissions would be correct.
However, for some reason, SUSE changed this in 9.1 (or 9.0?) so that the userids now start at 1000. Not knowing how the other userids were organized, I was reluctant to change to the old 500 range and accepted this new range and chowned all the copied files so that they had the right permissions. Unfortunately, this has caused huge problems for my home LAN - I have a second SUSE box downstairs running 8.2 (not had time to upgrade it), which therefore of course has userids starting at 500. This means that the NFS shares I have set up so that the two boxes can share files are broken, because the userids on the two boxes are different :-(
I know it's fairly easy to fix, but it's an annoying and apparently needless change.
So, a question - will it cause any problems if I changed the userids on the 8.2 system to the 1000 range? There are no other custom users other than what the box creates itself. This is the easiest fix for me now.
Thanks,
John