Re: System cannot find user IDs

On 2003-05-03 20:49 +0000, Tom Parquette wrote:
> Please CC me on any replies.  I'm on my wife's machine writing this and 
> I can't get to my mornal MUA.
> 
> I've been working on setting up MySQL and I have been having problems 
> with the MySQL root user.  Thinking I might have changed the user to 
> upper case when I changed it from root (based on a best practices 
> article from onlamp.com) I added the MySQL admin id in upper case.
> 
> I got a message that the user id had disappeared during the add.  (I've 
> never seen this message before.)  I'm assuming it came out of the 
> adduser command.
> 
> I tried to remove the ID and I started getting messages from various 
> places complaining about user IDs.  Thinking something might be out of 
> sync, I rebooted.  (Appears to be a very bad idea in hind sight.)
> 
> It seems like every daemon complains at boot that it cannot find one 
> user id or another.  I also cannot sign on to the machine.
> 
> I was able to get into the machine in single user mode.  I took a recent 
> backup  I made of ad0s1a to another machine, untared it, copied passwd 
> and master.passwd to a floppy and restored them to the failing machine. 
>  The reboot after restoring passwd and master.passwd gave me the same 
> results.  I can still get on the machine in single user mode.
> The FreeBSD Handbook didn't help me much so I looked at Greg L's The 
> Complete FreeBSD and he talks about some db files (/etc/pwd.db and 
> /etc/spwd.db) on the bottom of page 163.
> 
> After reading that and some hits searching the questions list I decided 
> it was time to ask for help.  I'm in way over my head this time!
> 
> I'm not sure how to dig myself out of this.  TIA.
> 

You need to rebuild the databases. Use pwd_mkdb(8).

-- 
Munish Chopra