Show users with UID < 1000 according to /etc/login.defs definition of minimum UID

[jonas]

It would be nice with an option to show users with UIDs below 1000 in the face greeter. Since Max OS X starts their users at 501 I have a few Ubuntu machines set up with with UIDs starting at 501 (since that is needed for the NFS mounts to work nicely).

/etc/login.defs has a UID_MIN setting that is set to 1000 by default, and which is used by useradd and users-admin (at least) to define normal users (as opposed to system users). GDM should take this parameter into account when hiding system users. This way one could easily set this limit to be 500, and everything would integrate nicely.

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

Are you aware of /etc/adduser.conf options FIRST_UID, and friends? See that file for the full description of their meaning. I think setting FIRST_UID=500 instead of 1000 could solve your request properly.

[jonas (jonas73x)]

Milan: Thank you for the suggestion, I was not aware of that file. However, after changing FIRST_UID, FIRST_GID to 500 and changing LAST_SYSTEM_UID, LAST_SYSTEM_GID to 499 i stil do not see my users in the "users and groups" application. I only see root, and I need to change show_all_user to yes in order to see my users. Unless I'm doing something wrong I guess this means that my wishlist request would be for gnome-system-tools to use this setting, since it does not seem like it currently uses it? Thanks.

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

I've investigated a little more how we are getting the minimum UID for normal users, and it seems that /etc/login.defs settings are used if present, rather than those from /etc/adduser.conf. Could you try editing that file too? Though, I don't know why those two files are present, since some of their settings can conflict.

[jonas (jonas73x)]

brilliant! changing /etc/login.defs works fine. as far as i'm concerned this wishlist item is no longer needed. if only the new gdm greeter would read this setting (or some other setting) as well (and not hide my user from the login screen) everything would be great... thanks for your help.

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

OK, so moving the task to GDM, where the only problem left is. Updating description accordingly.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported, but feel free to report any other bugs you find.

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

Sebastien: any link to the duplicate? We can't close a bug that way...

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

> We can't close a bug that way...

You clearly don't read all the duplicates we get otherwise you would figure that we have the choice between spending the day looking to exact duplicate numbers or get work done and you would figure we can close duplicates

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the revelant bug number there is bug #459199

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

don't take the tone wrongly before it's just that the current team doesn't manage to deal with the number of bugs and the choice is to let known bugs open and add noise the bug list, spend the day being polite on duplicate or close them anyway and let the submitter look for the other bug number

[Ed Greenberg (edg-greenberg)]

After lots of investigation, I discovered that the boundary between system and user accounts is hard coded in gdm, and patched from 500 to 1000 by Ubuntu. I was able to rebuild the package. I'll post further on https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/459199