Users name missing

[Ricardo R Peirano]

Hi everybody
I´m looking for some advice to fix a wear behavior I'm experiencing in some of my hpux 11.11 servers. Sometimes I can't log into a server because teh /etc/passwd file can't be read. If you make an ll comand into de "/" directoroy you just see the users number id, not his names. To fix this I just make an "chown root:sys /etc/passwd" command and that's it. Previousl I just see his woners as "0:3". In this case, at the same time the /var fs was full. Any idea about what's the reason of this problem?

[Kent Ostby]

Could be a couple of things.

How many people have root on the machine?

If there are multiple then you might want to cut this back to one or two and re-set the password.

/var being full could be an issue if you were mid change to the password file, but then I'd think you would see an empty file.

More than likely its your mask value or someone editing it with an odd mask value.

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Your problem is that /var (and specifically /var/tmp) is filling. The passwd and group name caching daemon (pwgrd) uses space in /var/tmp for temporary files and when it can't write its cache data then the daemon returns invalid results. Your chown updates /etc/passwd's metadata stored in the inode) and that update is detected by pwgrd and forces a reread and a rebuilding of its caches when there is now room in /var. Your fundamental problem is filling up the filesystem; stop that and you will fix pwgrd. You also have the option of disabling pwgrd; UNIX boxes ran for decades without this daemon and yours will too but that still doesn't fix the filesystem filling up. The pwgrd problems are merely symptoms.

[Ricardo R Peirano]

Clay, thank´s you for your clear and fast answer. I´m felling reliefed now becasue I have thought it was a kernel problem or shomething like that. Thank you very much. Regaards. Ricardo.

[Ricardo R Peirano]

The answer was fast, clear.