2 users 1 UID?

cli_man · 06-06-2003, 10:11 PM

I do alot of webhosting and I have companys that would like several usernames and passwords to be able to ftp the files to the server, all the users need to be able to add, delete, and modify the files in that directory. In the past when one user would post a file another user in the same group could not modify, or something like that, there always seemed to be odd problem.

My question and it is probably a bad idea but...

Can I have several users with the same uid? I wouldn't have thought of it but I mistakenly made sever users in webmin with the same uid and it didn't crash my system or anything, or will this give me big problems in the future?

In my mind if it is ok to have several users with the same uid there would be no permission problems. Oh and as a sidenote the users only have access to the web so there is no other data to concider.

Thanks for the info

whansard · 06-06-2003, 11:10 PM

yes you can.
next poster will say,
no, you shouldn't

cli_man · 06-07-2003, 08:22 AM

That is what I thought, but I thought it would be worth an ask.

whansard · 06-07-2003, 02:18 PM

if you think about it, it's not really like having several
users with with the same id, it's like have one user
with several passwords(and login names)

the standard way for doing what you want would be to
make a group that those users belong to, and the
default file creation permission mask makes files
rwx to that group. i guess what you want is
permission 775 for those files.

JayCnrs · 06-07-2003, 06:55 PM

Yes you would want one group, ensure everybody is part of the group and the group has read write permission.

For the directory you would want do this in console:
chown -R user:group /name-of-directory
chmod -R 775 /name-of-directory

This will change permissions on every file in the named directory, give that a shot and everybody part of that group should be able to write to the directory and change files in the directory.

Also doing this way everybodies primary group must be the same. If that is not possible then you might want to run a script for the chown and chmod whenever a new file is placed in the directory. I'm not sure if this is possible I'm not very good at scripts yet.