[ec2-beta] the ubuntu users home directory

[Michael Greenly]

One of the obvious deviations in the Ubuntu EC2 beta AMIs is the use of sudo
and the 'ubuntu' user.

Ignoring that I'm not convinced there's a security benefit I'm worried about
the decision to put the only login account in /home and to use a normal UID
for the account.

It seems likely to me that with the ubuntu user having the UID of 1000 will
cause collisions.  Someone is going to try and migrate an application from
some other distribution/ami to this one and run into this problem?

Also because home is attached to the root file system by default, which is
limited to 10GB, it pretty much guarantees that any application with user
accounts will require /home to be moved to an EBS volume.  It's the nature
of EC2.  This becomes a tiny bit more complicated when the only login
account has it's home directory is inside /home.

It would seem to me to make more sense to use a reserved, below 1000, UID
and to move ubuntu's home directory out of /home.




-- 
Michael Greenly
http://blog.michaelgreenly.com
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