adduser problem

[ub007]

Hi ,

I created a new user

/etc/passwd

joe:1005:0::/home/joe:/bin/bash

also added him to the group root

vi /etc/group

root:0:root,joe

when i do

su joe

gives me

ERROR: NO LOGNAME

Strange, any ideas??

[GlmLv]

try to avtivate the user with passwd beforehand.

[reed9]

No, it's not requires for a user account to have a password.

I'm confused why you aren't using the useradd or adduser command to create the user?

Also, you shouldn't edit /etc/passwd or /etc/group with a plain text editor, but use vipw and vigr instead.

But here's help on manually creating a user.
Creating a user

Also, why are you giving your user the root group id and adding them to the root group?

[ub007]

I'm confused why you aren't using the useradd or adduser command to create the user?

I did try adduser first.....

Also, why are you giving your user the root group id and adding them to the root group?

I was planning to give this username to my technician to carry out some maintenance work. it needs root privileges to carry out some of these tasks, at the same time I'm wary of giving him the root password.

Also, you shouldn't edit /etc/passwd or /etc/group with a plain text editor, but use vipw and vigr instead.

i should have mentioned this earlier. this is a busybox kernel, no vipw applet

[reed9]

I did try adduser first.....

And what happened? You can find the busybox man page here, including its adduser command instructions.

I was planning to give this username to my technician to carry out some maintenance work. it needs root privileges to carry out some of these tasks, at the same time I'm wary of giving him the root password.

Better to use sudo to set him up with specific privileges.

[ub007]

-busybox adduser creates the user, but its like 'useless' as in I'm not able to login using that user, or su to that user. I see the user in /etc/passwd and do stuff like change password etc....but it doesnt help....


-already went through the manual,
sudo doesn't work on busybox....

-this is a custom build on busybox, maybe thats what preventing me from getting what i required from adduser.

Any other suggestions?

[clowenstein]

You might as well give Joe the root password since if you put him in group 0 he can do everything that root can do. Including changing the root password so you don't know it any more.

[Mudgen]

Putting user in root group does not give it root privileges in any distro I'm familiar with, but I'm no busybox expert. It would mostly just give some additional file perms, some of which might be useable to compromise root. In Fedora, Ubuntu, et al, it definitely does not permit running passwd with a username (e.g. root) specified. It also thus probably would not accomplish what you're trying to do.

I do create additional uid 0 users for temporary root privileges quite frequently on RedHat boxes, for circumstances like yours. I normally create with adduser then edit /etc/passwd and change uid to 0 (and chown -R root:root the home directory).

What happens when you add with adduser and then try to log in or su? The same error as with your hand-rolled entry?

The thing that looks odd about the entry you posted
joe:1005:0::/home/joe:/bin/bash
is that there's no password field, unless that grimace face is supposed to represent a colon. It should look like
joe::1005:0::/home/joe:/bin/bash
or
joe:1005:0::/home/joe:/bin/bash
or some such. The uid is not the second field, it's the third. So you'd be off by one on all fields after the username.

Is the colon actually there, and the grimace face just an artifact of posting?

EDIT: I can see that in my reply the colon-x that I put in after Joe in the second "should look like" line shows up as a grimace face when displayed. So, I guess your entry is probably correct, fieldwise.

[Mudgen]

What happens if you "passwd -u joe" as root? Also, does /etc/shadow exist? Is joe in there?

[oz]

Is the colon actually there, and the grimace face just an artifact of posting?

EDIT: I can see that in my reply the colon-x that I put in after Joe in the second "should look like" line shows up as a grimace face when displayed. So, I guess your entry is probably correct, fieldwise.

If you'll look underneath the text box where your inputted text goes when making a post, there is an option to "Disable smilies in text". Checking that will stop the auto smiley thing from happening.