FreeBSD 5.3 forgets some of my users

[Gordon Tetlow]

Kövesdán Gábor wrote:

> Hello there,
>
> there is a strange thing.... FreeBSD 5.3 randomly frogets some of my 
> users. Sometimes I see in the first column of the ps aux output the 
> uid number instead of the login name, but next when I run it, there is 
> the login name. Besides, I tried to chown a directory to an existing 
> user, but the I get an error message, that there wasn't such user.
> I immediately checked passwd, group and master.passwd files in /etc 
> but the entry for that user was present there. The pw userdel was 
> unable to delete that user, so I had to manually remove it from those 
> three files and create it again. It worked then, but a bit later there 
> was the same result. I'm quite annoyed now. This state isn't safe 
> enough, I have to do something to get around with this. Do You have 
> similar experiences? Or do You now some kinda workaround?

Don't edit the /etc/passwd and /etc/master.passwd files directly, you 
get into a lot of trouble. Use vipw or the pw command.

Also, please don't crosspost between current and stable. Please post to 
whichever branch your machine is following.

-gordon