Organisation-wide uids?

[K Farvis]

At Edinburgh University, we are planning our computing future which looks
like it will be based heavily on distributed filestores using NFS.  This
brings with it the spectre of having a unique uid for all University
users.  As well as the fact that the uid range may not be sufficient for
our needs, we would have to change all our current machines (and archive
files) to use these new values.  We are envisaging that our VMS community
will be included as well - with the added complications of uid and group
ids that that brings.

It is not clear what we can do about this, but it does strike me that we
cannot be alone in this dilemma and that it is more than likely that the
problem has already been tackled somewhere else.  I would appreciate any
feedback from any large site who has any light to shed on this problem.

   Keith Farvis

mail:		keith at etive.ed.ac.uk
snailmail:	Edinburgh University Computing Service,
		King's Buildings, Mayfield Road, Edinburgh  EH9 3JZ, UK  
telephone:	+44 31 667 1081 x 2661