Unresolved user id

[Stefano_27]

I was asked to create a local user, say "user2" on a HP-UX B.10.20 machine, say "machine1", having the same home directory, say "dir1", and group as a previously existent "user1" (local as well). The group "group1" was not local, but configured in the yellow pages.

I used the SAM utility to perform this task. At the end of the creation, SAM warned me not to create again the home directory dir1 (because already existing) and I did not select the creation option.

After this operation a third user, say "user3", already existing and configured in the YP, belonging to group1, on machine1 could not be resolved in terms of user id.

The command "id user3" has the output "Can't find user user3", and its home directory, say "dir3", could not resolve the owner name, putting a code instead.

The same checks performed on a different machine belonging to the same NIS domain are successful, though! Therefore it must be a local problem of "machine1".

What can I do?

Thanks,

Stefano.

[Robert-Jan Goossens]

Hi Stefano,

Identical group name or groupid ?

# ypcat group | grep group1

# grep group1 /etc/group
repeat with groupid

Robert-Jan.

[Stefano_27]

Hi Robert-Jan,

no duplication.
Group1 is only a yp group and is not configured in the Yellow Pages. Nor any id duplication is present.

Bedankt voor de steun,

S.

[Stefano_27]

Sorry,

I mistyped ... Group1 is only in the YP and not present locally.

[Robert-Jan Goossens]

Hi Stefano,

Have you tried running pwck and grpck ?

Kind regards,

Robert-Jan.

[Stefano_27]

Hi Robert-Jan,

grpck and pwck show no information (so no errors) about user3. I guess because user3 is a NIS user and locally does not exist.

I think the problem lies somewhere in the local machine in terms of NIS database. The machine is a NIS slave server. I stopped and started it (both client and server) again but the problem remained.

Thanks,

Stefano.

[W.C. Epperson]

Disclaimer: Never did yp on hp-ux, and it's been a long time since I did it on AIX and SCO.

The yp implementations I worked with were very sensitive to corruption in the maps and/or their source files. Check to make sure the map xfers are going to the slave successfully. Look for errors generated by map builds and lookups. I used to regularly have to ypremove/ypmake on slave systems with problems like you describe and/or with map errors.