SAM adding accounts to group 'users'

[Fred Martin_1]

When I create a new account via SAM, the primary group in the password file is set to the group 'users' ... but SAM also adds the user to the 'users' group in /etc/group.

Is this redundant? On SunOS we never put users in a group if it was their primary group, and if I remember correctly there was a limit to the number of users that could be in a group anyway.

[Andreas Voss]

Hi,

you have to differ between user/group id's and user/group names:
In /etc/passwd the user id, the user name and the user group ID is registered.
In /etc/group the names for the group id's are registered.

Greetings

Andrew

[Thomas G. Tudrej]

hi,

My suggestion would be to get the latest cumulative patch for SAM. What you described is not normal behavior on HP-UX.

[Rick Garland]

What I remember is a bug that limited the number of characters in a group to 1024 for NIS. The map build would fail.

[Fred Martin_1]

Just so there's no misunderstanding, I am not manually doing anything here, SAM is doing it all. Example, through SAM I create a new account "fmartin"...

The result is an entry in the password file:

fred:passwd:232:20:Fred,,,:/home/fred:/usr/bin/ksh

And the user is also added to /etc/group:

users::20:john,harry,fred

The primary group is set to 20 -and- the user is added to the same group in the group file.

As regards patches, I installed 10.20 cold in December, but our previous 9.04 system behaved exactly the same.

Fred

[Fred Martin_1]

Sorry for the typo, that's a new account "fred" not "fmartin" ...

[Bill Hassell]

Unit recently (10.20, recent patches for SAM), each user was added to the group file even though it was redundant. Back in the 9.x days, it would cause line-too-long errors until SAM put just a few users per line. The latest 10.20 SAM patch will fix this and at 11.0, it is standard behavior for SAM to not add users to /etc/group except when an additional group is added to the user's environment.