Bug 167687 – userdel allocate all system memory and then fail

Bug 167687 - userdel allocate all system memory and then fail

Summary:	userdel allocate all system memory and then fail

Status:	CLOSED WORKSFORME

Aliases:	None

Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
Classification:	Red Hat
Component:	shadow-utils (Show other bugs)
Sub Component:
Version:	4.0
Hardware:	All Linux

Priority	medium Severity medium
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Assigned To:	Peter Vrabec
QA Contact:	David Lawrence
Docs Contact:

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Depends On:
Blocks:
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Reported:	2005-09-07 03:36 EDT by Milan Kerslager
Modified:	2007-11-30 17:07 EST (History)
CC List:	0 users

See Also:
Fixed In Version:
Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Last Closed:	2006-07-19 03:39:09 EDT
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RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Attachments	(Terms of Use)
strace of infinite loop in 'userdel -r kp' (108.15 KB, application/octet-stream) 2005-09-07 03:41 EDT, Milan Kerslager	no flags	Details
Add an attachment (proposed patch, testcase, etc.)

Groups: None (edit)

Description Milan Kerslager 2005-09-07 03:36:39 EDT

In some cases 'userdel -r' allocate infinite amount of memory and then fail.
This is long standing bug as I saw this behavior years ago so I think it is not
introduced by recent patches.

# userdel -r kp &
# ps xaumOT | grep userde[l] (repeated)
root     20333 28.0 39.6 450484 406740 pts/1 -    09:34   0:06 userdel -r kp
root     20333 27.7 45.8 513536 469840 pts/1 -    09:34   0:07 userdel -r kp
root     20333 27.9 51.0 567848 524064 pts/1 -    09:34   0:08 userdel -r kp
...
malloc(664) failed
#

Comment 1 Milan Kerslager 2005-09-07 03:41:41 EDT

Created attachment 118542 [details]
strace of infinite loop in 'userdel -r kp'

The bug does not depend on '-r' switch.

Comment 2 Milan Kerslager 2005-09-07 03:46:49 EDT

Hm. When I manually deleted this user I found that there was no record in the
/etc/gshadow file. Maybe this was lost when the system has been moved to another
machine or so.

Comment 3 Peter Vrabec 2005-09-21 05:33:37 EDT

I can't reproduce it.

I deleted(userdel) user foo after group foo had been removed from /etc/gshadow
and I got "userdel: error removing shadow group entry" but user foo was removed
properly.

Comment 4 Peter Vrabec 2005-10-24 08:21:27 EDT

Did u have two lines begining with same group name in /etc/group?

example:
#/etc/group
groupa:x:998:user1,user2
groupa:x:998:user3,user4
#/etc/passwd
user4:x:1773:998::/wic/home/user4:/bin/bash

"$userdel user4" spin in infinite loop now.

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