[techtalk] Old horse new bug HELP!

[Brian Sweeney]

Hey guys,

Once again, this archaic network has me sweating.  Here's the deal:

We have a webserver running (GASP) RHL4.2.  I know, it's being replaced.  In
any case, it's serving lots of content, and suddenly today it's A) Refusing
to add new users, and B) it seems to have forgotten about some of the old
ones.  When the users are added, it adds them to /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow
and creates home directories for them (I used the adduser function), but
when you finger them they don't exist, you can't login as them, and when you
list their folder it shows the number not the name of the user.  Some of the
older users are exhibiting the same behavior.  I'm one of them :P.

Any ideas?  It doesn't seem to happen to all the users, the user IDs are not
sequential.  It doesn't seem to be related to their creation date.  There's
nothing out of the ordinary in logs...I'm at a loss.  Any suggestions are
appreciated.

Thanks,
Brian

-Brian

-----------------------------------------
Brian Sweeney
bsweeney at physics.ucsb.edu

"The life expectancy of an unpatched, default installation of Red Hat 6.2
server is three days. The last time we attempted to confirm this, the system
was compromised in eight hours."
-The Honeynet Project