Bug 5268

Summary:	NIS disables(?) local accounts
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	aram
Component:	passwd	Assignee:	Cristian Gafton <gafton>
Status:	CLOSED WORKSFORME	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	6.0	CC:	aram
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	1999-10-05 06:13:17 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description aram 1999-09-21 14:36:40 UTC

I have 2 redhat 6.0 boxes running NIS and having local
accounts. Local accounts except root (2 login-able accounts)
don't work anymore, i.e. I can't login using their
username/passwd combination via (virtual) console or
remotely. I can log in as root from console or login as an
NIS user. I can edit /etc/passwd and add new local users
that way, create/chown their dirs, but when I `passwd
newuser` as root I type in the passwd twice and get the
result that all auth token have been updated successfully,
while /etc/passwd still shows an unchanged passwd field. No
shadow passwds.

I can `/bin/su localuser` from root and stuff works, but
that is less than ideal.

/etc/nsswitch tells it to looks at (local) files before nis.
The only pointer I have is the /var/log/messages line that
says that the pwdb structure is no longer valid. And when I
try to `passwd` from a local user account (into which I've
su'ed from root) I get "Auth service cannot retrieve auth
info".

Comment 1 Cristian Gafton 1999-10-05 06:13:59 UTC

Are you sure this is not a problem of having shared UIDs between NIS
and the local system?

Also, you might not want to edit the local /etc/passwd by hand - use
useradd instead. There is a bug in passwd that will refuse to set the
passwords for accounts with an empty password field.