HEADSUP: New getent tool to read passwd and group data

[Corinna Vinschen]

On Feb 21 22:42, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Feb 21 16:20, Pierre A. Humblet wrote:
> > > From:  Corinna Vinschen
> > > > Corinna,
> > > >
> > > > For packages such as exim we need to find the uid of System and of
> > > Administrator, which the user can set any which way in passwd.
> > > > So we lookup the SID (not the username) to get the uid (or gid).
> > > [...]
> > > > Is there an equivalent mechanism using getent ?
> > > > Else, could Cygwin disregard the passwd entries for these 2 users and use
> > > only the fixed values determined by the mapping from Windows?
> > > 
> > > You should not have to expect a name change for the SYSTEM and the
> > > Administrators account.  It should be entirely sufficient to check for the user
> > > Administrator and the user SYSTEM or +SYSTEM.  
> > 
> > Is that independent of local language?
> 
> SYSTEM, yes, Administrators, no, unfortunately.
> 
> > > If you really want to check
> > > by SID, feel free to enumerate all accounts by just omitting the username and
> > > scan for the SID you're looking for:
> > 
> > >   $ getent passwd | grep ',S-1-5-32-544:'
> > > 
> > >   $ getent group | grep ':S-1-5-18:'
> > 
> > OK, thanks, that will work. 
> > We have had cases of people in very large organizations trying to build the password with mkpasswd -d and that ended up taking hours. Won't the above run in the same issue?  This needs to run in postinstall.
> 
> It depends on the "db_enum" nsswitch.conf settings.  Did you read my
> text about the change by any chance?  If not, see my latest version
> here: http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2014-02/msg00585.html
> 
> Yes, it might take time, even though the LDAP queries should be slightly
> faster than the NetUserEnum call before.  Therefore it would make more
> sense to check for the uid/gid values 18 and 544, IMHO.

For the records:

I prepared the Cygwin DLL to allow fetching passwd and group entries by
SID, and I have a new version of getent ready for upload which allows
to fetch passwd and group entries by SID:

  $ getent passwd S-1-5-32-544
  $ getent group S-1-5-18

This also works with the current file-only based passwd/group handling,
but the change requires at least the upcoming Cygwin 1.7.29.

So, if you want to use getent with SIDs, just wait a couple more days
until we released 1.7.29.


Thanks,
Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat
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