Single site-wide uid space

[mike anthis]

In article <avo7w9.8yc at wang.com>, fitz at wang.com (Tom Fitzgerald) writes:
> steve at arezzo.siemens.com (Steve Giovannetti) writes:
> >      Has anyone come up with schemes for maintaining a single site-wide uid
> > space?  I am in the process of developing one for our site.
> 
> We sleazed out of this one.  Everyone's UID here is a function of their
> telephone extension.  For most people, it's just the last 4 digits of the
> extension, but there are also some tricks to make sure that there are no
> collisions, that nobody's ID is in the range 0 to 200, and that there is
> a reserved space for UUCP logins and other inorganic accounts.

My (SunOS) man page for sa(8) says:

BUGS
     sa's execution time increases linearly with the magnitude of
	  the largest positive user ID in /etc/passwd.

I am wondering how big the UID's have to get for this to become a problem?

Or is this not a problem for some other reasons?

I guess this boils down to the question:

	how big is a _practical_ limit on UID space;
	is it the same as the _legal_ limit?

If someone expresses interest, I'll summarize e-mailed replies.

Yours,
mike
-- 
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Mike Anthis               uunet!bcstec!sleepy!anthis 
90% of good taste is found in 10% of the population.
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