Bug 7714

Summary:	group file corrupts when adding a lot of group members
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	charta
Component:	shadow-utils	Assignee:	Bernhard Rosenkraenzer <bero>
Status:	CLOSED DEFERRED	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	6.1	Keywords:	Security
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:	2000-02-03 16:43:59 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 charta 1999-12-09 23:19:08 UTC

Hello, bugtrackers,

I am running free web based mail system and it is important to me
limit and control my mail users access rights and behaviour. After system
upgrade I assigned all my 5000 mailusers to one group. Result - totaly
corrupted /etc/group file. I noticed, that it is possible to assign about
200 members to one group without group database corruption. Corruption
symptoms are: extra spaces, newlines, a lot of commas around group names
and inside group name, zeros...

It is very important to fix this bug, because if system is running any
automated user adding mechanisms you could note too late, that some of your
users haven't any quotas, have access to ftp or other services that are,
normaly, restricted!

Sorry, I did not look at shadow-utils sources yet, so I can't say where
exactly bug is, but I think you should take a look at group handling
functions and incorrect buffering, or smth.

Thank you for your support.

Andrius Adomaitis
System Administrator of
"Gaumina design" - web desing & hosting
mailto: charta

Comment 1 Elliot Lee 2000-02-03 16:43:59 UTC

This is not a bug with shadow-utils specifically, so much as a limitation with
UNIX in general.