Re: [cobalt-users] [Qube2]Wierd Login prompt (I have no name!@machine)

[shimi <shimi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 17 Apr 2001, Colin J. Raven wrote:

> Hi Gang!!
> A strange and unusual event happened on a Qube2. The shell login prompt
> has changed from [user@machine]$
> to
> [I have no name!@machine username]$
> 
> 
> doing a "whoami" from the prompt produces the following:
> [I have no name!@machine username]$ whoami
> whoami: cannot find username for UID 112
> 
> When the user attempts to start pine he also sees the following:
> [I have no name!@machine username]$ pine
> Who are you? (Unable to look up login name)
> 
> The user can login succcessfully, can su to root successfully (this is a
> trusted user) but keeps getting the message above. Nothing seems broken.
> In /etc/profile and all .bash_profile files the shell prompt PS1 string
> has been commented out, but of course this has no effect.
> 
> 
> Has anyone ever encountered this behavior before? A search of the
> archives drew a *complete* blank on this one.
> 

Hehe, no wonder. This doesn't happen just like that. It once happend to
me.. before shadow passwords appeared on redhat, I didn't want any local
user (or via that FTP bug that has been back then, CWD ~/root or
something) to grab a copy of /etc/passwd and start brute forcing to crack
a password of a user on the system.
So I made /etc/passwd readable only by root (basically removed read access
from group and other) - the result was what you just describe. If you're
wondering why it's possible to login at all, that's because the program
which accepts logins is ran from root.

unless you didn't touch /etc/passwd permissions - someone else did - and
you should be VERY worried, because that "someone" has root access to
your machine...

> Regards to all,
> -Colin
> --
> Colin J. Raven

b. regards

- shimi