@ub & @cb issues

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 04:38:02PM -0400, Bill Vermillion wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 04:01:06PM -0400, Tim Fischer thus spoke:
> > Bill,
> 
> > You lost me there. What do you mean "change their UID to the
> > missing one"? What's the missing one?
> 
> When you see a number in the CB or UB field that is the UID of the
> original creator/updater.  The programs grabs that UID and goes to
> the password file to get the matching UID [User ID number] and then
> print the name.   If there is no matching UID it displays the
> number.
> 
> > We did find something though - The old UIDs (SCO) were 4 digits
> > while the new UIDs (Solaris) are 5 digits. Would that make any
> > difference?
> 
> That should make no difference.  A few years back Solaris expanded
> the UID field capability to be 10 digits.  [It may have been only
> 9].  That was so that students in large University environments
> could have the UID match their SSN.  That was before all the
> concern over purloined SSN numbers.

It's a problem, Bill.

It's a problem because the size of @UB and @CB in filepro is a *signed*
short: 2 bytes, minus a bit.  That means that the largest acceptable
UID it can store is 32767, anything between that and 65535 will come
out as a negative number, which will then fail when filePro tries to
GetNamebyUID it.

> Most systems will let you change the IDs.  When you do that and
> file created by the person with the current ID will now show
> ownership of just the ID number and not the person's name.

I believe you failed to notice the *minus* sign in the middle of that
numeric ID, Bill.  :-)

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     Baylink                             RFC 2100
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        "They had engineers in my day, too."  -- Perry Vance Nelson