It turns out that my Chown problem was really a UID problem. From reading
the man pages for chown I found out that chown uses the character string
provided and matches it to the UID. So if you know the users UID you could
just supply it instead of the username. chown UID directory. For as long
as anyone here can remember we have retired accounts via dxaccounts then
deleted the entries from /etc/passwd. I am not positive that we are going
to move away from that school of thought. I have been told that vipw is the
best way to edit this file. So I will probably start using that.
Our problem is this......the ghost user and user id are still somewhere in
the machine.....not in /etc/passwd. Many suggestions came in and suggested
that /etc/passwd is the file that chown looks in to match username and UID.
That can't be right if the ghost users name is not in the file at all. It
looks somewhere else that I haven't been able to find. Basically what the
summary of all the inputs have been is to just leave the accounts retired in
dxaccounts and not to reuse UID. That doesn't make sense to me at all. In
a place where users come and go I would end up with 3 or 4 thousand retired
accounts. There has to be a way to do away with users and their accounts.
And then reuse UID's. I don't know the way yet but I will find it. A few
responses suggested to use
edauth -r
convuser -d
I think these commands are really a great start to getting me on the right
track. Thank you very much to those who wrote and tried to help.
Especially the ones who wrote with out some silly tone of arrogance.
I don't want to leave anyone out as far as naming those who helped. Those
that did know the advice the gave and can know that I offer my sincerest
thanks.
Marc Woods
Network Systems Administrator
RAMPOD
Voice: (912)926-5404 Fax: (912)926-9717
SAIC
Science Applications International Corporation
Received on Fri Jan 19 2001 - 16:14:27 NZDT