useradd question

[sparky_2]

The default behaviour of the useradd command is to only add a userid to the /etc/group file in the case of secondary group membership, because the primary group information is stored in the passwd file. On one of our systems, however, userids are being added to their primary group field. Excessive redundant information, I think, and this will probably lead to group file corruption with continued growth. Anyone have any ideas about why this may be happening? Thanks.

[hein coulier]

i think this is a default behavour of a linux system : each user gets a private group.

[Steven E. Protter]

The OS has a hard limit on how many groups a user can be in, 20 for 11.11(11i).

I would look at any user add scripts you or your operations staff are rnning.

I'd also check the default user profile in /etc/skell

This is either being done by script, default profile or manual edit.

SEP

[sparky_2]

Thanks for your responses, but this actually occurs with a simple "useradd -g -m testuser". Further investigation has indicated that this is possibly a feature of the 10.20 OS...

[Robert-Jan Goossens]

You are completly right,

---

At 10.20, when adding users via the useradd(1M) command, an entry for
the user was added to /etc/group. When using useradd at 11.0,
this does not occur and /etc/group must be manually updated. This occurs
even with the latest useradd patch for 11.0.

---

Useradd does not add an entry to /etc/group at 11.0 DocId: KBRC00003218

http://www5.itrc.hp.com/service/cki/docDisplay.do?docLocale=en_US&docId=200000063201097

Regards,
Robert-Jan

[sparky_2]

Thanks for the verification Robert-Jan. I assume that manually removing the userids from the group file (there are multiple duplicate group entries) will not affect user accessibility?

[Robert-Jan Goossens]

Good question :-) i'm not shore !!

It has been a long time since I had to admin 10.20. I would suggest to test it with a few users before removing them all from the /etc/group file.

Kind regards,
Robert-Jan