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In my network there is a special user group with the ID 101. Unfortunatelly, Debian wants to use the ID 101 for the group systemd-journal.

Since it exists only locally, I assigned systemd-journal the group ID 99 and so I was able to have our special user group 101. I know this is asking for trouble, but the alternative is using a distro where group ID 101 is not used by the OS.

Every time something/-one calls dpkg-reconfigure systemd there is an error, b/c dpkg is unhappy about the GID change. In these cases I switch the GID of systemd-journal back to 101, do the reconfigure and then switch it to 99 again.

This is so much manual work, I was wondering: How can I make dpkg accept the GID change of systemd-journal to 99? Can I make it ignore this problem?

Bananguin
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  • Alternatively: You maybe able to map the GID of the network share to a different (reserved) number, when you mount it. – ctrl-alt-delor Apr 13 '19 at 18:57
  • @ctrl-alt-delor When mounting a share I can do a gid mapping of an arbitrary id to another arbitrary id? Will this leave other group-ownerships intact? How can I do that? – Bananguin Apr 13 '19 at 19:04
  • Yes, I think so. You should reserve a GID for it. However I am not the person to ask, as I have only seen it in the manual, but not done it, or remember where in the manuals. (I would start with looking at the mount manual). – ctrl-alt-delor Apr 13 '19 at 19:28
  • @ctrl-alt-delor I did before writing my comment. It's not there. I only thing I was able to find quickly is that with NFS4 I can set the GID of the nobody group when mounting a share. I'd rather not overload the nobody group. – Bananguin Apr 13 '19 at 19:31
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    This may help https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/158695/4778 – ctrl-alt-delor Apr 13 '19 at 19:33
  • @ctrl-alt-delor nice! i'll try bindfs. I think this can solve my actual problem. Thanks! I'd still like my question answered. :D – Bananguin Apr 13 '19 at 19:36

1 Answers1

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You can use a different gid for systemd-journal, but it has to be in the system group range, which by default is 100–999. You could extend the range to include 99, by editing adduser.conf, but that would be a bad idea because groups 0–99 are allocated statically.

So you can’t easily make 99 acceptable as a gid for systemd-journal, but you can use another gid such as 999. Another approach could be to configure adduser.conf to specify a system range which is safe on your network, say 200–999, before the first system group is created.

Stephen Kitt
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