pwd.db too big for / partition

[Chuck Swiger]

On Mar 19, 2007, at 1:49 PM, Tamouh H. wrote:
> Well, I had a VM laying around so thought to fire it up and do some  
> testing. I know this is absurd abit but I wanted to see the effect  
> of doing symlinks with pwd.db files.
>
> - I was able to copy /etc/pwd.db /etc/spwd.db to /var/etc/
> - Then I deleted /etc/pwd.db and /etc/spwd.db
> - created ln -s /var/etc/pwd.db /etc/pwd.db   and ln -s /var/etc/ 
> spwd.db /etc/spwd.db
> - changed the root password, worked!
> - Even rebooted the system and was able to successfully able to login

I invite you to repeat the experiment when there is an issue with / 
var which prevents it from being mounted cleanly until, say, a manual  
fsck is completed....  :-/

-- 
-Chuck