tape warning!!

[matteo casarino]

tar: couldn't get uname for uid 65534
tar: couldn't get gname for gid 65534

what does that warning mean??

[Carlos Fernandez Riera]

tar: couldn't get uname for uid 65534.


On /etc/passwd there is not user # 65534.

Also tar cant manage uids over 64k.

[K.Vijayaragavan.]

check the below mentioned link:

http://216.32.180.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=6e78b60889ac873a5421e6752b9d9ccb&lat=1013594309&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fforums%2eitrc%2ehp%2ecom%2fcm%2fQuestionAnswer%2f1%2c%2c0x94f335067c18d6118ff40090279cd0f9%2c00%2ehtml

-K.vijay

[matteo casarino]

this warning mean the my tar on tape is not efficent?

[Trond Haugen]

The warning only tells the UID couldn't be found. The contents of the files are OK.

Trond

[Shahul]

Hi

I faced this same problem, i will tell U when it was. Suppose U are backing up a file or directory owned by a particular user and group. Suppose Right now the corresponding entry is missing in the corresponding file (I mean /etc/passwd and /etc/group), Then this warning used to come. If U want to avoid please the corresponding entry in corresponding files.

best of luck
Shahul

[Peter Kloetgen]

Hi Matteo,

tar is allready a very old command. In that time it was made, nobody thougt about systems with that much users. ( more than 64534... ) If you use UIDs bigger than that, tar does his job, but the owner of the data is no longer the user with that UID, but the process who did the job.

Use the pax- command instead of tar! It is a new command which will be the industrial standard instead of tar/cpio. This command has no problems with UIDs up to 2 billion and is also able to handle files bigger than 2 GB. It is available on all UNIXes and in planning for Linux. That command is able to read all tar and cpio- formats.

more infos: man pax

Allways stay on the bright side of life!

Peter

[harry d brown jr]

matteo,

If you really need UID's over 64K, then I suggest installing GNU's tar, which HP has ported:

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Gnu/tar-1.13.25/

It also allows you to do a tar to a remote tapedrive, and handles files larger than 2gb.

live free or die
harry

[Sanjay_6]

Hi,

You can ignore this warning. This tape was copied on some system where there was a user with userid 65534, could be user "nobody" . Now when you are restoring it it this system, the systems tries to match that user id with the userid's in the /etc/passwd file and hence is unable to match the user id since the user id does not exist in /etc/passwd. The file will still be copied on the system, but the owner and group might be numbers. That is because the system does not have a user id with that number. There is no problem with that. you can use the chown / chgrp commands to change the owner and group of the file(s) in question.

Hope this helps.

regds

[Darrell Allen]

The uid/gid warning just means you don't have a user registered with the uid/gid listed. That does not mean your tar file is bad.

After extracting the tar file, you will want to change owner and group from 65534:65534 to whomever you think should own the files. It's a good practice to first use tar's tv options to see what is actually in the tar file. You should note what is being extracted and where. Then you can use find to chown the files:
find extract_dir -user 65534 -exec chown UUU:GGG {} \;

Substitute the userid and groupid you want for UUU:GGG.

Darrell