I understand your concerns with the incorrect uid/gids, but these files will be owned by root.root, which is standard for all systems, so this shouldn't be a problem for this particular case, right?
-dan On 25, Oct, 2005, Henning Glawe declared: > On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 12:58:35PM -0400, Dan B. Phung wrote: > > so..i'm trying to understand the way fcopy works in the fai's scripts dir. > > i'm friggen confused. i'm trying to have NIS setup automatically, but > > haven't been able to copy the files I want over. i'd like to copy my > > predefined files such as passwd, groups, and shadow onto the new system. > > my files are currently located on the NFS mount directory, which I don't > > think is the correct place. > > > > from what I understand, to do: > > > > fcopy -i /etc/passwd /etc/groups /etc/shadow > > > > I need the directories in FAI/files/etc/{passwd,groups,shadow} and > > in each, I need to have a file with the name of the class that > > is installed. Is that correct? ...and the contents of the > > file are the contents of my actual file (ie, my /etc/passwd) > > this is completely wrong. the contents of these files depend highly on the > packages installed to the system (and their order): packages use 'adduser' to > add accounts/groups to run daemons under and a lot of other different things. > > if you blindly copy a /etc/passwd to your system, you will end up with wrong > file ownerships assume installation of packages 'blah' and 'blubb' > > - blah.postinst: adduser --system blahuser (allocates UID 127 for blahuser) > chown blahuser $somefile > ($somefile has owner 127 in the filesystem) > - blubb.postinst: adduser --system blubbuser (allocate UID 128 for blubbuser) > chown blubbuser $someotherfile > ($someotherfile has owner 128 in the fs) > - if you copy a /etc/passwd to the system where blahuser is 128 and blubbuser > is 127, blubbuser owns $somefile and blahuser $someotherfile > > you can have even more fun with 4750 binaries and swapped groups... > > conclusion: never, ever copy /etc/{passwd,shadow,group} from one system to > another, edit them via sed, perl or cfengine > -- email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] www: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~phung phone: 646-775-6090 fax: 212-666-0140 office: CS Dept. 520, 1214 Amsterdam Ave., MC 0401, New York, NY 10027