sharing UIDs between Solaris and Linux

Steve Hsieh (steveh@eecs.umich.edu)
Mon, 2 Mar 1998 12:33:16 -0500 (EST)

Linux's uid appears to be 16bit, while Solaris' uid is 32bit? This makes
it problematic to share uid entries (/etc/passwd) in our heterogenous
networking environment. UIDs in our university are assigned beyond our
control, and since Solaris is the primary OS on campus, new accounts are
being assigned UIDs around 80000 and higher simply due to the lack of
space under 65534.

Is there any way I can work around this? Am I correct that to convert
linux's uid to long I'd have to recompile the kernel and all the user
programs as well? And I don't know if this would work at the end, either.

Are there any future plans that linux might move to a 32bit uid?

Thanks.

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