System cannot find user IDs
Munish Chopra
mchopra at engmail.uwaterloo.ca
Sat May 3 18:27:02 PDT 2003
On 2003-05-03 20:49 +0000, Tom Parquette wrote:
> Please CC me on any replies. I'm on my wife's machine writing this and
> I can't get to my mornal MUA.
>
> I've been working on setting up MySQL and I have been having problems
> with the MySQL root user. Thinking I might have changed the user to
> upper case when I changed it from root (based on a best practices
> article from onlamp.com) I added the MySQL admin id in upper case.
>
> I got a message that the user id had disappeared during the add. (I've
> never seen this message before.) I'm assuming it came out of the
> adduser command.
>
> I tried to remove the ID and I started getting messages from various
> places complaining about user IDs. Thinking something might be out of
> sync, I rebooted. (Appears to be a very bad idea in hind sight.)
>
> It seems like every daemon complains at boot that it cannot find one
> user id or another. I also cannot sign on to the machine.
>
> I was able to get into the machine in single user mode. I took a recent
> backup I made of ad0s1a to another machine, untared it, copied passwd
> and master.passwd to a floppy and restored them to the failing machine.
> The reboot after restoring passwd and master.passwd gave me the same
> results. I can still get on the machine in single user mode.
> The FreeBSD Handbook didn't help me much so I looked at Greg L's The
> Complete FreeBSD and he talks about some db files (/etc/pwd.db and
> /etc/spwd.db) on the bottom of page 163.
>
> After reading that and some hits searching the questions list I decided
> it was time to ask for help. I'm in way over my head this time!
>
> I'm not sure how to dig myself out of this. TIA.
>
You need to rebuild the databases. Use pwd_mkdb(8).
--
Munish Chopra
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