On 01/12/2018 09:47 AM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Fr, 12.01.18 09:28, Steve Dickson (ste...@redhat.com) wrote:
> 
>>> User namespacing is a Linux kernel feature. It's most well known
>>> consumers are probably Docker, and maybe flatpak/bubblewrap and LXC.
>> Well know for how long?
> 
> The commit adding user namespaces to the Linux kernel was in 2007. 11
> years ago, in kernel 2.6.23.
Wow... we've been living this way a long time... Seemly without any problems?
If that is the case then I really don't see a need for this change
that could potentially cause such havoc.
 
> 
>>> It's not systemd that came up with reusing 65534 for user
>>> namespacing. It's kernel people:
>>>
>>>         $ cat /proc/sys/kernel/overflowuid 
>>>         65534
>> How was that number chosen and why can't be changed?
> 
> It's conceptually the same thing: it's where UIDs are mapped that
> cannot be mapped properly otherwise.
Right... I'm assuming this overflow almost never happens
from looking at the code. 

> 
> In theory you can change it by echoing something into sysctl, but
> that's mostly theoretic, and not what the various consumers of userns
> do.
Understood.

> 
> And regardless, it's conceptually the same thing anyway, so it makes a
> ton of sense to use the UID there for both NFS and userns
> purposes. While I have my reservations about userns in general the
> logic behind using that UID for this purpose is very clear to me and
> makes sense as far as I can see.
> 
So the problem trying to be solved is when the overflow uid/gid
are used (which is rarely), the owner of the file become 
nfsnobody which does not make any sense because it is on a local filesystem.

If this is the case, my I suggest that since the overflow uid/gid is 
basically an arbitrary value and easily changeable... Why not 
have some boot process echo '99' into /proc/sys/kernel/overflowuid 
which would match nicely to a uid/gid of a user named 'nobody'? 

steved.
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