[19649] in Athena Bugs
Re: New athena release 9.0
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David M. Collins)
Fri Aug 17 20:37:28 2001
Message-ID: <3B77DE62.9AC92ACA@mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 10:04:18 -0400
From: "David M. Collins" <dmcollin@MIT.EDU>
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>
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Resent-From: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>
Hi Jonathon,
Thank you for replying. I agree that there is little that can be done
with the filesystem corruption. I reinstalled and things are working
fine.
However, I still think that there is something not quite right with the
instructions:
>Yes, they appear to be up-to-date. One thing yo watch out for is to
>make sure that you use >> and not > when trying to add a user to the
>passwd file. The latter will overwrite the existing contents of the
>file.
Urm, if I type on a freshly installed machine
athena% cd /etc
athena% ls -la passwd*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1000 Aug 13 09:23 passwd
-rw------- 1 root root 644 Aug 9 15:10 passwd-
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 650 Jul 18 10:39 passwd.fallback
Even if I use >> I will have one entry in /etc/passwd.local from
athena% hesinfo >> username passwd
and it will not correspond with root!! I also think that an action on
/etc/passwd eg
cp /etc/passwd.local /etc/passwd
can screw up utmp under linux, but I may be wrong. I know for a fact
that on other flavors of unix e.g. HPUX this can cause bad bad things to
happen, as their tech support will atest.
> The instruction cp -r /usr/prototype_user /var/user copies the
> directory across, but it seems like it should just be the dotfiles
> that are copied.
I know that this is pedantic but
athena% cp -r /usr/prototype_user /var/user
athena% ls /var/user
prototype_user/
i.e. the dotfiles are not in $HOME!!
>This is probably because the root filesystem was mounted readonly.
>Linux does this so that you can boot to single user mode even if there
>is some filesystem corruption that can't be corrected automatically.
>On linux, the following command will generally give you write access
>to the filesystem from single user mode:
> mount -o remount /
Thanks for the tip!!
> Furthermore, athena had automagically copied a version of /etc/passwd
> over /etc/fstab, so I had difficulty in mounting the files systems!!
> (This definitely seems like a bug.)
>Athena wouldn't do this. It is almost certainly due to filesystem
>corruption from shutting your machine down with the power button, and
>you noted below.
I likely explanation. Thanks for looking into this.
David
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