[chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Updating uid/gid of existing user

[Nils-Helge Garli Hegvik < >]

Thank you for the replies. I'm aware of the difficulties. Just wanted
to check if someone had handled this with chef already. It's a third
party package, so I would like to avoid rebuilding the package to hard
code the uid there. And it would still require the same manual
handling I guess, since the user already have different uids on
different nodes.

Regards,

Nils-Helge Garli Hegvik

On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 4:55 PM, Eric Herot 
<
 >
 wrote:
> Think of the user ID as being basically the “primary key” for a user object.
>
> This stack overflow post explains pretty well why primary keys are
> notoriously difficult to update (and why doing so is generally a bad idea):
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3838414/can-we-update-primary-key-values-of-a-table
>
> I take it the real requirement here is that this user must have the same UID
> across all nodes in the cluster. Is it possible to specify the UID you want
> to use in the package seed data so that it always uses the same (hard-coded)
> ID upon install?  Of course this will deal with new installations but
> existing installs are probably still going to be a bit of a manual process
> (like the one Jeff describes below).
>
> --
> Eric
>
> On December 17, 2014 at 9:33:38 AM, Jeff Blaine 
> (
 )
> wrote:
>
> On 12/17/2014 7:28 AM, Nils-Helge Garli Hegvik wrote:
>> Yeah, that part I have figured out. The issue is what happens to files
>> owned to the previous uid/gid, that is not in the user home folder.
>>
>> Nils-H
>
> Hi Nils,
>
> No, the user resource does not address this. This is when a human is the
> tool for the job. You will need to manually, one-time, address this on
> your systems via (most likely) various invocations if the 'find'
> command. You have uncovered a lack of previous planning (centralized
> directory services and/or UID/GID policies) and now get to rectify it
> once and for all, but there's no magic tool to help you unwind legacy.
>
> An analogy is, "I have 3 MySQL databases. Will the PostgreSQL cookbook
> code find them on the network and migrate them to PostgreSQL?" :)
>
> Jeff
>
>> On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 1:20 PM, Tiago Cruz 
>> <
 >
>> wrote:
>>> You can "force" in your recipe like this:
>>>
>>> group "deployer" do
>>> gid "501"
>>> end
>>>
>>> user "deployer" do
>>> uid "501"
>>> group "deployer"
>>> comment "deployer"
>>> end
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 6:08 AM, Nils-Helge Garli Hegvik
>>> <
 >
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hi!
>>>>
>>>> I need to take control over a user created by a package that is
>>>> installed in our syste, so it does not change between
>>>> uninstall/install. Therefore, I want to use the "user" resource to
>>>> define a uid and gid for this user, so it is already created/modified
>>>> before the package is installed. The problem is, the user already have
>>>> different uid/gid between different nodes, so I can't really just find
>>>> the current uid and then set it to that uid. For some nodes, this will
>>>> cause the uid of the user to change. So, the question is, how do I
>>>> handle ownership of existing files and directories where this will
>>>> cause the uid to change? For files in the home folder, this is handled
>>>> automatically by the 'usermod' command, but not so for files
>>>> elsewhere. I assume someone has come across this issue before, so how
>>>> did you handle it? Can the current "user" resource handle this, or
>>>> does a recipe exist that can handle this?
>>>>
>>>> Regards,
>>>>
>>>> Nils-Helge Garli Hegvik
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> -- Tiago Cruz
>>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> Jeff Blaine
> kickflop.net
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