getting UID higher that 99999

[Alexander Skwar]

Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Saturday 17 June 2006 21:43, The_Eye_In_The_Sky wrote:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> my company is a quite big Unix vendor, thus the NIS is using UID
>> higher 99999. To synchronize the Ubuntu with other Linux and Unix
>> server, I need to make it capable addressing UID higher than 99999.
>> Do you which setup I need to tweak?
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Bad luck I'm afraid. AFAIK the UIDs on Linux are 16 bit, so they go up 
> to 65535.

That's not true - or rather, it used to be true "way back then". In
modern Linux, UIDs aren't 16bit anymore. See the definition of uid_t
in /usr/include/linux/types.h.

Also a simple test (on Gentoo) shows, that UIDs aren't restricted
to 16bit anymore:

[09:28:07 vz6tml at dewup-ww02:~] $ touch /tmp/uid_gid_test
[09:28:11 vz6tml at dewup-ww02:~] $ sudo chown 123456:654321 /tmp/uid_gid_test
Password:
[09:28:22 vz6tml at dewup-ww02:~] $ ls -la /tmp/uid_gid_test
-rw-r--r-- 1 123456 654321 0 21. Jun 09:28 /tmp/uid_gid_test

Alexander Skwar
-- 
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