Running Systems

First, let me state that this is not a desirable action. It can be done, because, as root, there are so many things which are considered “bad practice” you can still do – this is part of what’s ‘root’ is all about – you know what your system needs, and you know how to do it, even if it’s in a twisted weird way.

In this case, there are two users. One of them is an application user, used by the application administrators, who do not share their password (which is good). The other account is used for file transfers to this directory by an external system which does not support SSH keys. So – the first team won’t share their password (which is fine), the second team needs to place files, and a very complex process of copying the files as the second user, and then chown them to the application user is devised.

A quick solution: Make both users have the same UID and same GID. The result would be that the first user (application user) would have its own password and continue doing whatever it is doing now, while the second user would be able to just drop files where they should be, and they will remain there, with the correct permissions.

A reminder – Linux cares little for user names. They are used in many reverse and forward translations, however, on filesystem, the user ID and group ID (UID and GID, in that order) are what matters. The file’s metadata includes the number, not the name.

A simple solution would be to create the user with ‘useradd’ and the flag ‘-o’ which means “non-unique”. This is very simple to do, and would pose no problem.

However, the application users might see, when running ‘ls’ commands, that the files belong to the other, transfer, user, and vice versa. This is caused not by the current login information, but due to the local NSCD caches in use. In particular – ‘nscd’ – the Name Service Caching Daemon.

So – we would strive to have both users see their own “name” when listing files, because otherwise, it will create some user unrest, which we strive to avoid.

The trick is to disable caching, by editing the file /etc/nscd.conf with these values:

enable-cache passwd no
persistent passwd no

Following that, restart the ‘nscd.service’ on your system, and your users should see their “own” name when listing files.