chown: invalid user problem

[ysuluhan]

hi all... this is my first time here, hopefully not the last...

i have a problem with changing file permissions on ubuntu server 10.10

i was installing asterisk 1.8 to the system. for that i created a user named asteriskpbx and added a group named asteriskpbx under sudoers file. added the user to the group in the group and gshadow files..

after that, tried:

$ sudo chown -R asteriskpbx:asteriskpbx /usr/lib/asterisk/

which returned something like:

chown: invalid group something something... (i really dont remember)

after seeing that, i thought maybe users and groups should have different names and changed the asteriskpbx group' s name to pbx in the gshadow, group and sudoers files.

now the command:

$ sudo chown -R pbx:asteriskpbx /usr/lib/asterisk/

returns:

chown: invalid user: `pbx:asteriskpbx`

what should i do to solve this...

thanks in advance...

[Roxoff]

You should start checking your spelling of the group and user names you've entered. You probably used the user creation tools to add a user and a group, but you should double check them. There should be entries in /etc/group /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow for the users you've created - check that their entries match the other entries in those files.

Go to a text console and try to log-on as that user (you might have to set a password for them first) - if you can log on correctly then you know the user works. You can delete their hashed password field from /etc/shadow after this if all is well.

If you can log on as that user, try changing the user and group of a file separately, and without the recursion like this:

$ echo " " > testfile.txt
$ sudo chown asteriskpbx testfile.txt
$ ls -l

and if that works try

$ sudo chgrp asteriskpbx test.txt
$ ls -l

If either of these fail you'll have an idea where the problem lies - and if they both work then you've probably got an error somewhere else. Give this a try and report back to this thread if it still doesn't work.

[ysuluhan]

i didn' t used a user creation tool... i created the user named asteriskpbx from cli... and added the group named pbx through adding the necessary lines to the files below

spelling is ok....

from /etc/group file related line -> pbx:x:1002:asteriskpbx

from /etc/sudoers file related line -> %pbx ALL=(ALL) ALL

from /etc/gshadow file related line -> pbx:!::asteriskpbx


i tried the first test for the asteriskpbx user... no problem...
i tried the second test for the pbx group(which asteriskpbx belongs)... no problem....

but still no luck with the recursive folder/file permission changes....

[ysuluhan]

i' m an idiot... command itself is wrong.... it should have been:

$ sudo chown -R asteriskpbx:pbx /usr/lib/asterisk/

not pbx:asteriskpbx

although it might have something to do with using

$ sudo groupadd -f pbx

before trying the right syntax. because when the group name and the user name was the same(both asteriskpbx) it wasn' t working...

thank you for your answer anyway...

[Mudgen]

There's definitely no inherent problem with matching user and group names. root:root, oracle:oracle, etc.

[ysuluhan]

then it has definitely something to do with "groupadd -f"