Hi again all, In a recent post I described the issues I was having with reinstalling a system and trying (in vain) to recover the user and group db from backup. I gave up on that attempt and reinstalled again (ugh). I went through the process of re-adding each individual and group account by hand from the command line using adduser, usermod, and passwd to avoid my previous mess. Now I'm getting the following errors.
When I log into my account - ken - it reads id: cannot find name for group ID: 529 when I type 'groups ken' it reads: id: cannot find name for group ID 529 529 id: cannot find name for group ID 0 0 id: cannot find name for group ID 517 517 id: cannot find name for group ID 520 520 id: cannot find name for group ID 521 521 id: cannot find name for group ID 522 522 id: cannot find name for group ID 526 526 id: cannot find name for group ID 514 514 However, if I su to root and type 'groups ken' it reads correctly like so: ken : ken root adminonly stewards exec members ntadmin tester Just to be thorough, here are the respective entries from passwd, group, and shadow plus the file perms for my /home dir passwd: ken:x:527:529::/home/ken:/bin/bash group: ken:x:529: shadow: ken:(passwd hash):11744:0:99999:7:-1:-1:1073871134 'ls -l /home': drwx------ 15 ken ken 4096 Feb 21 20:49 ken/ As you can see, each respective group name gives an error to my account. I'm completely baffled. This is occuring AFTER i went through the process of manually removing my account. I edited /etc/group,shadow,gshadow,and passwd and removed myself. Then I used adduser and passwd to reestablish the account (with a new user and group id) Then I su to root and usermod -G to add the groups. This all went without errors. Then I exit su and type groups ken, it gives the correct results. I then log out and back in. Voila! The error returns as described above. Oh also, if I reboot the system (we had a power failure so I got to find this out yesterday) I have to reestablish groups for every account. The system comes back up with bare minimum groups for each user (ie each user is listed as belonging only to the group that bears their own name). This is a Mandrake 8.1 system. I'm completely baffled as to why this would be happening. Perhaps the system auth is referencing some other file containing some errors that is causing it to repeat those same errors no matter what I do with the ken account or the groups. How do I fix this? This brings me to my second question. Does anyone know of a way I can create a replicateable and/or distributable system auth database? What I mean is, an auth database that I would be able to install in another system (or a reinstalled system) using the same auth method thus having all the group and user accounts set up already? I have been reading into PAM and LDAP but can't find this kind of information. Or perhaps there is another authentication system that would work, NIS maybe? Or, if no one out there has an answer for that last question, what do you sys admins do when you have a system that needs to be reinstalled with 3,000 user accounts? 100 accounts? There must be a way to deal with this issue without manually adding each account all over again with a temp password that must be changed. If there isn't a way, how the hell do you guys deal with this? Hard drugs or liqour? My cigarette habit is already maxed out. Thanks for any help, Ken Nowack __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Greetings - Send FREE e-cards for every occasion! http://greetings.yahoo.com
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