[techtalk]Re: [techtalk] Old horse new bug HELP!

[Brian Sweeney]

> Heya --
>
> 	Offlist reply because I'm really taking a shot in the dark.  [grin]
>
> On Tue, Jul 31 2001 at 11:38:35am -0700, Brian Sweeney wrote:
>> Hey guys,
>
> 	[laughs]  Guys?
Guys? Boy, THAT tells you how stressed I was...what was I thinking? ;-)

In any case, figured out the problem.  Someone had deleted the "x:" on one
of the user's lines in the /etc/passwd file.  No one's owned up to it yet;
we'll see.

I'm guessing then that the userid's weren't totally sequential because
every some-odd lines, the :'s would match up again and it would be able to
parse that user.  But that's a guess.

Anyway, thanks for the shot-in-the-dark Raven.  Adios all...I'm going to
lunch.

-Brian



> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> techtalk mailing list
> techtalk at linuxchix.org
> http://www.linux.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/techtalk



-----------------------------------------
This email was sent using SquirrelMail.
   "Webmail for nuts!"
http://squirrelmail.org/