Printable View
I am using SuSE 7.2 and when I went to User and group administration, I found where were many login ID, I thought those ID were no usefull, so I deleted those IDs except root and my own Login ID, but after that, I found I cannot login by my own ID, luckly root is still work! how can I restore my setting! thanks.
I got the message: xterm:Couldnot exec bin/bash: Permission denied
I reinstalled the system again, the problem was solved, but anyone could please tell me why that problem happened,and what does those users exist for?
Generally, it's a *very bad* idea to just up and delete users you think aren't needed as everything from 0 UID to 20 UID (or the first 10 or so accounts in /etc/passwd) are system related accounts that the system uses. Several programs and such rely on a certain "user" to log in automatically by the system to run a command or something and if it's not there or something else is wrong, things go bad.
that's for sure it was a bad idea. but is there any way to restore my original setting?
Whenever I make a change to /etc/passwd, I always use 'vipw' to do it, as it makes a /tmp backup that you're working on and if you bail out or the system somehow crashes, it won't write to /etc/passwd. I *always* make a backup manually of /etc/passwd, /etc/group, /etc/fstab and other important files because you never know when you might need them.
As for restoring your original setting, if all you did was 'userdel user_name' from /etc/passwd, then you could do the following to restore them. Assume /etc/passwd.orig is a backup prior to your changes.
<QUICK AND DIRTY>
for i in `cat /etc/passwd.orig | awk -F: '{ print $1 }'`
do
USER=$i
UID=`grep "^$i:" /etc/passwd.orig | awk -F: '{ print $3 }'`
GID=`grep "^$i:" /etc/passwd.orig | awk -F: '{ print $4 }'`
INFO=`grep "^$i:" /etc/passwd.orig | awk -F: '{ print $5 }'`
HOME=`grep "^$i:" /etc/passwd.orig | awk -F: '{ print $6 }'`
SHELL=`grep "^$i:" /etc/passwd.orig | awk -F: '{ print $7 }'`
useradd -m -c "$INFO" -s $SHELL -g $GID -u $UID $USER
echo "$USER re-added to the system"
done
</QUICK AND DIRTY>
That should re-add them with the home, shell, info, etc etc. Most system accounts are locked by default so that nobody can log in as them. Hope this helps. PM me if you need more help.
thanks for your help. I thought that will be what I need, but unfortunately I really have no idea how to do that, where should I add your code to? which program do I need to launch? and one more worse thing is I never bachup anything before! I didn't find the file named as passwd.orig. Yes, there are only two users in /etc/passwd, passwd- and passwd.YaST2save. what can I do? could you please show me step by step!
Appreciated! Merry Chrismas!
And also there is another problem happened: sometimes I cannot control my mouse(Microsoft IntellimMouse Optical USB and PS/2 Compatible), when I touch the mouse, it goes to anywhere, but sometimes it works well. Is that problem caused by deleting users? also My SuSE Linux 7.2 doesn't support USB devices. How can I solve that problem?
Thanks.
The 'program' I wrote out is more of a script and depends on the password file backup. Unfortunately, if you don't have a backup, then you're pretty much out of luck unless you can find another user who uses Suse and compare against theirs. As for the mouse, you should be able to use usb devices as the daemon 'usb-uhci' controls all of them. It's looking like you might have to reinstall completely, which is unusual given the normal nature of Linux, but for this, I'm thinking that's the only thing you can really do at this time.
Merry Christmas to you too!
that's too bad! but anyway I learned one thing that is IF I AM NOT SURE SOMETHING, DON'T DO THAT!!
thanks for your help very much! Merry Christmas!