[Adduser-devel] Bug#708073: adduser: Recreating a system user fails when its UID is out of range

Afif Elghraoui afif at debian.org
Sat Nov 26 10:21:25 UTC 2016


Hello,

On Mon, 13 May 2013 00:12:45 +0200 Eduard Bloch <edi at gmx.de> wrote:
> clone 706382 -1
> retitle -1 Recreating a system user fails when its UID is out of range
> reassign -1 adduser
> severity -1 minor
> thanks
> 
> As discussed, the error handling in this case needs some improvement. As
> least there should be a meaningful error message telling where the
> error originated.
> 
> And/or it maybe should not be an error whatsoever, i.e. when the account
> exists then there is no need to recreate it.
> 

What happened in this case was that adduser was asked to add a system
user while the name is already taken by a *regular* user (maybe that is
the key word missing from the printed message), as determined by the
system UID range.

The system user range can be changed by the administrator in
/etc/adduser.conf if they want to use a different range to determine
what a system user is.

I'd appreciate any suggestions to make this more clear so this confusion
can be avoided in the future.

Thanks and regards
Afif

-- 
Afif Elghraoui | عفيف الغراوي
http://afif.ghraoui.name



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