Bug#854792: fails when there are two users with the same UID

[Axel Beckert]

Dear Emilio,

Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote:
> > Summary: accounts-daemon.service fails to work properly when there are
> > two users in the system with the same UID.
[...]
> I'm not sure that's a system configuration that is supported.

it's a not seldom thing to have a second root account which is often
called toor as that's its common name in the BSD world, see
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/security.html#idp60124648

There are multiple reasons to do that:

* If the beginning of /etc/passwd is wrecked for some reason, the
  second root user at the end of the passwd can still login

* root usually has the default login shell. Some people do not want to
  change that but have a user with root permissions and their
  favourite interactive shell, e.g. tcsh or zsh.

* The second root account could also sport a less comfortable but
  statically compiled shell including some builtin commands (e.g.
  busybox-static or sash) for fixing the system with onboard tools if
  libc6 is broken for some reason.

Actually Debian's sash package even encouraged the admin via debconf
to create such a second root user (called sashroot). That feature
though has been removed from the sash package quite a while ago
(although I learned about this only now and was unpleasantly surprised
about that maintainer's move).

> If you shoot yourself in the foot, you should expect some
> problems...

Unfortunately it has been become very common in Debian recently to use
such arguments to get rid of unpleasant bugs.

		Regards, Axel
-- 
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