Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 135280
hang & corruption when renaming a user
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:51 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040922 Description of problem: I created a user account and learned later the user wished for a different spelling. I launched system-config-users and selected the user in question and "properties". Under the "User Data" tab I retyped the users name and I also changed the home directory name. I clicked "OK". The hourglass is still turning, 5 minutes later. Poking around the terminal (which s-c-u contines to spin), I've determined that: - in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow, login and home have been renamed - in /etc/passwd- and /etc/shadow-, no changes - /etc/group and /etc/gshadow have not been updated - the home directory has not been renamed. Essentially, the account is now "broken" and I'm going to have to use superuser text editing skills to repair it. So I'm filing this as "high priority / data loss" because the GUI tool has easily broken a user's account. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): system-config-users-1.2.13-1 How reproducible: Didn't try Steps to Reproduce: 1. open system config users 2. select a user and "properties" 3. try to rename the user and their home dir Actual Results: (1) s-c-u hangs (hourglass tumbling) (2) incomplete changes render the account "broken" Expected Results: it should be possible to correctly rename an account, -or- it should be completely disallowed. As is, it appears to have corrupted this account. Additional info:
Andy, I tried this with the same results. Because I was running it from the command line, I got a python traceback which indicates that this is some kind of a libuser problem: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/share/system-config-users/userProperties.py", line 512, in on_ok_button_clicked self.parent.ADMIN.modifyUser(self.userEnt) RuntimeError: unknown error Andy, please tell us which version of libuser you have. Miloslav, should s-c-users (and in turn libuser) allow changing username and/or home directory or should we block it?
I'm running a pretty much up2date version of FC, the specific libuser is libuser-0.51.7-7.1.1
The RuntimeError is a duplicate of #78376 and #121252, and fixed in libuser >= 0.51.10. The more general problems: * ADMIN.modifyUser doesn't move the home directory by default, contrary to documentation. * the home directory move functionality actually can't work right now; it doesn't remember the old home directory. * libuser is working on a per-entity basis, so renaming of group entries (including the private group) has to be done by s-c-users. So, * I'll fix home directory moving and fix modifyUser documentation (rather than change modifyUser default) * Once that is done, s-c-users can call ADMIN.modifyUser(..., True), and Require: a fixed version of libuser. * s-c-users should rename the user in all user's supplementary groups and rename user's private group, if any. Sounds good, Nils?
Sounds very good, especially because that means getting a fix for this other python interface problem we had lately for FC2, i.e. I can get the fix in that if possible uid == gid for new users. I guess for s-c-users this means: - When renaming the home, just trust on libuser to do the right thing - When renaming a user, take care of the group entities so they don't have the old user name - When renaming a group, everything should be OK because users are either already listed with the group (when it's secondary) or the group is referenced by GID which doesn't change. Right?
Right. Fixed libuser is libuser-0.52.5-1. (BTW: libuser renames home directories by copying them and then removing the original; fixing this can probably wait post-FC3.)
Miloslav, can you then pipe a "libuser-0.52.5-0.fc2.1" or so through the build system for FC2? Thanks.
libuser-0.52.5-0.FC2.1 is published now.
system-config-services-1.2.25-0.fc2.1 containes the needed changes for renaming users.