[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#868568: Bug#868568: Possible cause of deluser problem: subordinate user IDs

[Serge E. Hallyn]

So deluser was doing the right thing, right?

The bug is how you got into this state?  Either the adduser for
the high uid should have checked for it being a delegated subuid,
or the adduser which added the subuids to the lower subuid should
have refused when the higher subuid existed as a uid.

On Tue, Mar 08, 2022 at 05:31:41PM +0000, Ben Harris wrote:
> I ran into a problem very similar to the one described in Debian bug 868568:
> deleting a user with a UID < 100000 failed because of a process that was
> running as a user with a UID >= 100000.  It turned out to be because the
> larger user ID was recorded in /etc/subuid as a subordinate user-ID for the
> lower-numbered user.  Blanking out /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid caused
> deluser to behave as normal.
> 
> According to login.defs(5), the default range of subuids starts at 100000.
> If you're using UIDs over 100000 for normal users then you probably want to
> change that (or find a way to disable subordinate user-IDs entirely).
> 
> -- 
> Ben Harris, University of Cambridge Information Services.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Pkg-shadow-devel mailing list
> Pkg-shadow-devel at alioth-lists.debian.net
> https://alioth-lists.debian.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pkg-shadow-devel