FC4 - useradd problem

[Guy Fraser]

On Mon, 2005-11-07 at 23:12 -0500, Ali Sobhi wrote:
> I just ran into this problem on FC4 that the command line "useradd" dies 
> with no messages and leaves .lock files in /etc/
> Selinux is disabled and I'm using "root" account to add users.
> The home directory is created with a uid and gid but passwd, group and the 
> corresponding shadow files are not updated
> 
> However, while using the GUI version, I'm able to add users !
> what happened?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Ali Sobhi
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Sr. Consultant - Austin Accessibility Center - IBM Research
> 512-823-0064 (T/L 793)              sobhi at us.ibm.com
>                       http://www.ibm.com/able/
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Make sure you don't have any excessivly long lines in :
/etc/passwd
/etc/shadow
/etc/group
/etc/gshadow

I ran into a problem recently where someone had hundreds of 
users assigned to a group and useradd would fail without 
explanation. I discovered it after I backed up all those files 
and used vipw and vigr to delete all the extra accounts, I
discovered that every user had been added to the users group.
'strace' may have shown the problem, but I didn't have to resort 
to that level of diagnostics to solve the problem.

Good Luck