Uses system user UID range for guest user

Bug #1038881 reported by Martin Pitt
8
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Light Display Manager
Triaged
Medium
Unassigned
lightdm (Ubuntu)
Triaged
Medium
Unassigned

Bug Description

lightdm creates guest users with adduser --system (or an equivalent), i. e. creates system user IDs < 500. This is less likely to conflict with LDAP etc. setups, but does cause issues like crash reports from the guest session being reported as "system errors" by apport to admin users. It might also cause some other unexpected permission issues where a privilege is granted only to system, but not to human users.

I think we should change the call to create guest users in the uid >= 500 range, i. e. drop --system.

Changed in lightdm:
status: New → Triaged
Changed in lightdm (Ubuntu):
status: New → Triaged
importance: Undecided → Medium
Changed in lightdm:
importance: Undecided → Medium
Revision history for this message
Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj) wrote :

Bug #1259562 is possibly related.

Revision history for this message
Robert Ancell (robert-ancell) wrote :

I have no idea why the guest accounts are created as system users... I would think it makes sense to drop the --system too.

Revision history for this message
Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj) wrote :

Robert,
For a few minutes I had the theory that the problem at bug #1259562 with guest users not being removed from accountsservice would be fixed, if --system was dropped when creating a guest session. However, I tested to use deluser to delete a regular user, and also in that case the file in /var/lib/AccountsService/users was not removed.

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