multiple ports trees

[Jonathan McKeown]

On Wednesday 15 November 2006 01:24, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> On Thursday,  9 November 2006 at  8:46:00 -0600, Christopher M. Hobbs wrote:
[sharing ports tree]
> > Also, what about user accounts between machines?
>
> With NFS you typically have the same user ID on all related machines.
>
> > I got to thinking that because some of the servers have the same
> > user accounts, would it be possible to share a password file or home
> > directories?
>
> Yes, again with some caveats.  The biggest ones are configuration
> files in the home directory that contain references to the system
> you're working on.  My biggest problem is the .emacs file: it refers
> to packages that I have installed on some systems only.

The issue which bit me when doing this was that many ports add a user using 
pw(8) (as indeed the Porter's handbook advises them to), and this uses the 
``next available'' uid.

In my case, on one server I added net/isc-dhcp3-server from ports before 
setting up LDAP: the result was a uid clash between the dhcpd user created by 
the port, and a human user in LDAP.

Even if LDAP had been set up, I would still have had to note, the next time I 
needed to add a human user, that the ``next available'' uid was being used by 
a port on one particular server.

I'm now in the process of creating two ranges of user numbers: one available 
to pw(1) and ports (through pw.conf(5) settings) and a separate range for 
human users - see my earlier post to this list (12 Oct 2006) for more.

Jonathan