Ubuntu
accountsservice package

  1. Bug #1290785
  2. Comment #3

Comment 3 for bug 1290785

Revision history for this message
Robert Euhus (euhus-liste1) wrote : Re: Users with big UID are invisible in login and Settings->User

I am using fresh install of Xubuntu 14.04 and I have a slightliy different behaviour than what is described above:

1. create a user with uid = 60001 (e.g change uid for an existing user in extended settings from users-admin dialog)
-> Result: The user is neither shown in the users-admin dialog, nor in lightdm-greeter, but can of course still log in manually.

2. in /etc/login.defs set UID_MAX=99999999
-> Result: the user *is* shown in users-admin dialog and after *reboot* the user also *reappears* in the lightdm-greeter
- Note: a simple 'service lightdm restart' was not enough, I had to do a full reboot!

So for me changing the UID_MAX in login.defs is a usable workaround, but it definitely should be documented, at least in the users-admin gui. Also a short note about the dropped users and a hint to the woraround (solution?) should be shown in the lightdm-logs.

Warning: I don't know yet, whether this setting in login.defs has some other security implications. I just noticed that there is a couple of new setting files concerning id ranges for "subordinate user ids" (e.g. /etc/subuid), which use some "uids" in distances of 65535. Sadly even after searching for quite a while I still don't have a clue what they are for.