Anomalous group IDs

Hello,

  • OpenMandriva Lx version: ROME 24.12

  • Desktop environment (KDE, LXQT…): KDE

  • Description of the issue (screenshots if relevant):

On a fresh install of ROME 24.12 there are a number of anomalous user groups that are installed on the system by default. I say “anomalous” because they exist in the 1000-- range, typically reserved for local sysadmin use, and are not assigned ids <1000 as system groups typically are.

I mentioned this issue already in passing in another thread and asked if it was safe to remove them, but no-one appeared to know what the groups were for. In the hope that increased visibility will attract a response, I decided to give this issue its own thread.

In the meantime I went ahead and removed the groups, and everything appears to be working fine without them.

This fact, together with the range, and a number of the group names, lead me to wonder if not these groups were created locally on a developer’s machine and leaked into the distro by mistake? If that can be confirmed, then I will escalate this issue to a bug report.

The groups in question are:

1000 - lusers
1001 - vboxsf
1003 - network
1004 - storage
1005 - sambashare

I would have thought you would have removed the ones you don’t want already. It is easy to add them back if needed.

You could go on OM-Chat and ask.

1000 - lusers    No idea what this is or does
1001 - vboxsf    If you do not use VirtualBox you do not need this
1003 - network    See below
1004 - storage    See below
1005 - sambashare    If you do not use samba you do not need this

You can find what storage and network groups do using an internet search. You could try to find out what a luser group even is.

My guess is that removing storage or network group would be ill advised.

This advice comes with no guarantee or warranty expressed or implied. :thinking:

Hi Ben,

I’ve been running almost a week with the groups removed on a test machine, and everything has been ok thus far. The point of this post is to try and find out if those groups should really be there, or not.

Here’s the issue: eventually, I’d like to migrate several machines and a RAID with data shared data from a previous, Debian-based network, which has multiple users mapped into the 1000-- range currently taken up by these groups. It is a lot less work (and a lot less chance of error!) to simply bring that data straight over than it is to map all the file uids / gids on the RAID to a different range. Moreover, addding the groups back in and remapping ids on a single machine is simple enough, but the effort is multiplied when you’re converting several, and, again, there is the risk of buggering up ownership on the RAID.

That’s why I’d like to get to the bottom of the matter – to find out if those groups should really be there. If not, then it is a bug that ought to be reported.

I’ll leave it a couple of days to see if anyone responds; otherwise I’ll try OM-Chat as you suggest.

I do not know enough to be making statements about what you are trying to do. I strongly suggest talking to OM developers. Although there certainly may be people in this forum knowledgeable on this problem.

Thanks, Ben. I will do that.

Being new here, I do not understand why these groups were not put below 1000. If they are needed, add them back somewhere like 970 - vboxsf