Re: gdm stuff

[Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows brown edu>]

On Fri, Jan 22, 1999 at 05:03:23PM +0000, Matthew Kirkwood was heard to say:
> On Fri, 22 Jan 1999, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> 
> >   I just got the latest gdm from CVS and it seems to be working pretty nicely.
> > I made a patch to keep it from displaying all the accounts such as mail, nobody,
> > and so on; I don't know if this is the Right Way but it works on my system.  It
> > hides all accounts in the browser except for UID 0 and UIDs between 1000 and
> > 65534.
> [snip]
> 
> Nice, except that RedHat (and possibly others) start their "real" user
> IDs at 500.
> 
> Alternatively, you may want to check if they have a shell listed in
> /etc/shells and possibly that they own their home directory.
> 
> Matthew.
> 

  Hmm, I was in a hurry. :-)  Even on Debian that's not quite right, it ought
to hide a larger range than it does (I think the real UIDs stop around 6000).
The other two are more work and have problems--for example, the 'dummy'
accounts on my system have their shell set to /bin/sh and several own their
home directories (www-data for example).  Is there any reliable, portable way
to find out which UIDs are real?  (perhaps see which accounts have a locked-out
password but that requires root privs, at least on a system with shadow
passwords; I believe gdmgreeter runs as gdm)

  Daniel

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