Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 15:23:32 -0800 From: Rishi Chopra <rchopra@cal.berkeley.edu> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: ID says no such user, PW says already exists ?!?! Message-ID: <3FDE4273.2080404@cal.berkeley.edu>
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This is gonna sound crazy, but: I got my FreeBSD box up and running and decided to add a user account for myself (avoid the perils of working as root?) I added a named account 'rchopra' and everything was honky-dorey. The following series of events occured and have left me confused and unable to use or re-add the 'rchopra' account: 1) I manually added myself to the 'wheel' account, in order to allow 'su' to root. Rather than using 'pw', I was under the impression just editing the entry in '/etc/group' would work; my entry looked like this: wheel:*:0:root:rchopra Was my thinking here correct? If not, can someone please point out my mistake? 2) This action seemed to cause a problem; I attempted to login and su, and I was not able to login successfully (my password would not work). I attempted to run 'id rchopra' at the command prompt, which returns an error: # id rchopra 'id: rchopra: no such user' Strangely enough, the '/home/rchopra' directory still exists. 3) OK, no problem right? Just run 'adduser' and create the account again... Unfortunately, after entering all the information for the user account 'rchopra' the system says: pw: user 'rchopra' already exists adduser: ERROR: There was an error adding user (rchopra) This happens if I add 'rchopra' to the 'wheel' group or the 'users' group (my only user-defined group so far.) So what gives? While I am curious and would like to know what went wrong (any illucidation as to what may have caused the error is of course appreciated), I would (more importantly) like to get my system consistent to the point of being able to add an 'rchopra' user account. What steps can I take to remove the (false?) rchopra entry or, alternatively, re-active the (working?) rchopra account? Thanks, Rishi
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