On Fri, Mar 31, 2000 at 12:23:28PM -0500, Arni Raghu wrote:
> Hi,
> Just curious...How many user accounts can I create on my Linux box...there
> must be some physical limit right..??? I f yes is this tweakable..??
Currently, the user and group id's in linux are limited to 16 bits
(this is changing with the 2.3 kernel to 32 bits but some libraries need
to be updated as well). That means that a user id can not be greater
than 65535 (2**16 - 1). Often the top couple of UID's are considered
reserved (-1 and -2 in signed 16 bit parleyance) for things like nobody
or guest. On RedHat, nobody is uid 99 so that reservation may not apply
to here. If your user id's start around 500 (typical), then you've got
room for roughly 65000 unique account uid's.
As soon as we get 32 bit uid's and gid's deployed, that should
top out at better than 4 billion accounts. By that time, you've got
other problems... :-) Even 65000 accounts is going to make for one
whopper of a password file (time for LDAP or some other authentication
system).
> A
Mike
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