David'sBlog

I upgraded the server that hosts this site from Sarge to Etch yesterday. I then paniced when I typed ‘ps aux’ and saw the line

102 7353 0.0 2.3 11632 3040 ? Ss Sep10 0:00 /usr/sbin/exim4 -bd -q30m

The 102 really should have read “Debian-exim”. This concerned me for a long time (not least of all because exim was also having difficulty connecting to the sql database). Then I discovered that the new version of ps’s reaction to long usernames is to display the uid instead. So where on sarge it displayed “Debian-”, on Etch it displays 102. I had presumed that nss was screwed or something. But apparently not. Panic over.