IRIS

IRIS would like to inform to all sysadmins in the department about some upcoming changes to our Unix groups which may affect some of your users and systems. These changes will primarily affect people who login to Unix servers and manage their files using Unix tools, or administrators of Unix servers that rely on the department NIS mammoth domain, or who have made local copies of the mammoth group file.

The issue is that we are changing the names and gid numbering of some Unix groups. Some old groups were created with gid numbers that are now conflicting with reserved groups in current releases of operating systems popular in the department, such as Red Hat / CentOS and Ubuntu. Effective June 1, 2017, any IRIS-created group with a gid below 1000 will be renamed “was-XXX” and a new group created with the original name, and the same gid + 10,000. All users will be temporarily added to both groups. Our goal is to make a path now for people to upgrade to the newer groups and sunset the old groups and gids. We hope to have all users migrate their own files to the new groups, or ask IRIS to do it for them, by June 1, 2018, which gives us about 1 year to fully complete the transition. All groups with GIDs below 1000 will be removed from the mammoth group file at that time. (See examples at the end of this message.)

We will also be changing the primary group (the group listed in the passwd file) for all users with a primary gid < 1000, to the new gid for the same group. This may affect users access to un-migrated files since their processes will now run with the new gid. Migrating any files or access controls to the new group numbering scheme should resolve any issues that arise. On May 23rd, we sent messages directly to affected users informing them about the changes and providing instructions on how to update their files. This targeted email listed the specific group or groups that are changing that affect that user. Some reminders and updates will be posted on the IRIS website. More detailed updates and discussion can happen on the new moderated mailing list gid-updates@lists.eecs.berkeley.edu. Any interested parties can subscribe by visiting the list’s homepage here: https://lists.eecs.berkeley.edu/sympa/info/gid-updates Here are some concrete examples. Currently: * grad:*:116:
* staff:*:772:

Between June 1 2017, and June 1 2018:

* was-grad:*:116:
* was-staff:*:772:
* grad:*:10116:
* staff:*:10772:

After June 1, 2018

* grad:*:10116:
* staff:*:10772:
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