passwd and adduser fail on FC3

[Paul F. Almquist]

On Saturday 12 March 2005 15:27, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 13:22:47 -0800 (PST), Zach Wilkinson
>
> <ztwilkinson at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Just installed new FC3, yum update, etc.
> >
> > Trying to add additional user accounts via adduser and
> > getting the following error:
> >
> > # adduser testuser
> > adduser: cannot rewrite password file
>
> try useradd
Don't bother, it's the same program, just a different name

# ll /usr/sbin/useradd /usr/sbin/adduser
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root     7 Jan 18 21:00 /usr/sbin/adduser -> useradd
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 57648 Dec  3 19:59 /usr/sbin/useradd
Technically possible that the behavior could vary when called by the different 
names but quite unlikely in this case.  The man pages  returned for "man 
useradd" is the same as for "man adduser"

The normal permissions are:
# ll /etc/passwd /etc/shadow
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 1979 Feb  9 14:13 /etc/passwd
-r--------  1 root root 1229 Jan 17 16:16 /etc/shadow
However I just did "chmod 000 /etc/passwd" and then an adduser or useradd
which was successful.
So we know what is not the problem.

Is the root file system mounted in read-write mode?
# mount
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 on / type ext3 (rw)
...

On earlier RedHat versions during startup the root file system is mounted 
read-only so it could be fsck-ed and then remounted read-write if all is 
well.  I do not know if Fedora does the same thing but something else to 
check.

-- 
Paul F. Almquist
paul at almquist.name
Eau Claire, WI  USA