[PLUG] unsigned short UIDs?

[Mark Senn]

mds = Mark Senn <mds@purdue.edu>
williamj = Josh Williams <williamj@cs.purdue.edu>

    mds> I understand that unsigned shorts are used for UIDs in Linux.  Please
    mds> let me know if you know of a Linux (not FreeBSD or Solaris) or any
    mds> work going on to use ints or unsigned ints for UIDS.  I'll summarize
    mds> to the list.

  williamj> This is done in the kernel and shouldnt depend on a certain Linux
  williamj> distribution.  Plus, I doubt there will be much of a need to
  williamj> support more than 64,000 users on one machine any time soon, which
  williamj> is the number of UIDs an unsigned short can represent, assuming it
  williamj> it is bits.  So am I on crack, or are there operating systems out
  williamj> there that support more than 64k users?

On min.ecn running SunOS 5.6 (= Solaris 2.6):

% sort -t : -k 3,3n /etc/passwd | tail

olinm:*:78121:1:Mark Randall Olin:/home/min/e/olinm:/bin/csh
lu8:*:78174:1:Chao-Yang Lu:/home/min/e/lu8:/bin/csh
arslan:*:78276:1:Osman Arslan:/home/min/e/arslan:/bin/csh
tpzhang:*:78555:1:Zhang Tianpei:/home/min/e/tpzhang:/bin/csh
hux:*:78613:1:Xiaohui Hu:/home/min/e/hux:/bin/csh
hcchen:*:79347:1:Haichun Chen:/home/min/e/hcchen:/bin/csh
zhongyu:*:79348:1:Yu Zhong:/home/min/e/zhongyu:/bin/csh
kildishe:*:79718:1:Alexander Kildishev:/home/dynamo/c/kildishe:/bin/csh
yuanhui:*:80163:1:Yuanhui Zhou:/home/min/e/yuanhui:/bin/csh
ecndev:*:80276:1:ECN Development Account:/home/asphodel/a/ecndev:/bin/ksh

The numbers are sparse to avoid UID conflicts since lots of
files are shared via NFS and NFS only goes by UID, not login.

HP-UX 10.20 also supports over 64K.

Mark
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