I am extremely sorry if I am posting to the wrong mailing list, kindly point
that out to me if that's the case.
I'll be referring to /etc/{passwd,group,shadow,gshadow} as "legacy file bundle"
or "legacy bundle" or "legacy file(s)"
systemd-userdbd.service is a service included in systemd, which:
- Dynamically creates records for "root" and "nobody" users, and these needn't
be in any of legacy files.
- Reads drop-ins from {/usr/lib,/etc}/userdb for "static" user and group
records with pre-defined ids (for now). This is appropriate for most of the
system users.
- Under /run/systemd/userdb, each provider of users and groups will provide a
varlink socket with a standard interface for querying for users and groups.
- All references to users and groups regarding membership of users into groups,
whenever/if a user/group doesn't exist in any of the providers, is silently
ignored.
- One of the services is meant as a compatibility mechanism for glibc NSS
modules.
- nss-systemd is a module which looks up user and group records via
systemd-userdbd.service interfaces.
- Care is taken to avoid recursion between nss-systemd and the glibc
compatibility hook.
- Drop-ins are supported to incrementally modify a user/group record (For
example add user "root" to groups without overriding systemd-userdbd's records).
For human users like you and me, there is systemd-homed.service
- It exposes the human users via systemd-userdbd.service interfaces.
- It supports many conveniences like per-user encryption (not openable just
with root)
- It is (almost) portable across systems.
- Much more
- Although minor SElinux issues exist...
The only thing I know which still uses the legacy bundle is systemd-sysusers,
it's random UID/GID allocation. It could use /etc/userdb or (preferably)
another /var/lib/systemd/userdb where sysusers will put the systemd-userdb
records (and remove them when sysusers.d entries are removed).
These tools overcome the problems of the legacy file bundle. (For example, on
fedora atomic desktops, the legacy file bundle is under /usr/lib instead of
/etc for packaged users and groups, in order to facilitate a hermetic /usr, and
then adding yourself to groups like incus or libvirt needs you to copy the
group line to the /etc bundle. This isn't an issue fo systemd-homed users,
where the record is dynamically synthesized and the user is in the correct
group.)
In conclusion, the systemd suite contains tools to improve user and group
management. With the exception of systemd-sysusers, everything can replace the
legacy file bundle with a more modern suite of integrated and extensible tools.
--
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