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Article:
  Home on the Go with NetInfo
Subject:   different UIDs for the same user name
Date:   2002-09-23 13:14:20
From:   anonymous2
One thing that should be noted is that under the concept of a UNIX username is a UID. Your UID is what really identifies files as belonging to you, etc. So if you have two systems and the same username on both, it doesn't guarantee that you will have corresponding privileges (as far as I can figure). This has been a real pain since I used the removable home directory setup.


Since I've been using this setup, I can actually wipe users from systems without any real downside. So I'm drop my user on one system, recreate it, manipulate the UID and home directory values in NetInfo so that they match my other system and see if that straightens everything out.


To the author; please post a comment about this issue!


Oh yeah, I've also had weird residual /Volumes/ listing for drives that have been put away properly and unhooked from the computer. The result is that when I rehook the firewire drive up, from the command line (ls) the drive name is listed (and is empty), but the new instance of it is name "drive name 1", thus throwing NetInfo off. I've ended up having to manually "rm -rf drive_name" and then reboot. If I don't do anything the old instance of the drive_name persists beyond reboots even!


Any clue about how to work around this?


Thanks,


Walter
tech@mars-hq.com
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  • different UIDs for the same user name
    2003-02-10 16:38:26  robleach [Reply | View]

    I have a somewhat similar issue. My computer's on a network. When I set up my account, I naively used the same username as I'm known on the network. I'm trying to figure out how to resolve this and I'm wondering if I can just create a new user with the same name but different uid. However, I have another problem. I can't figure out how to permanently mount the network disk that has my home directory. I tried creating an fstab file and entering the disk, but it appears to not do anything when I restart. I have a mount command in my .login file, but it seems to not always succeed and for various reasons during the week, I'll lose the mount, like when the remote machine reboots or there's some other network interruption. In the meantime, can I just create another user with the same username? The account is a generic unix account. Are there any hoops I have to jump through to make it work with my mac?