[ale] passwd tells me I'm an imposter...

[jmills at jmills.gtri.gatech.edu (John M. Mills)]

On Fri, 29 May 1998, Joe Bayes wrote:
> I'm running RedHat 5.0, and:
> 
> r49h115:~$ passwd
> UID and username does not match, imposter!
> r49h115:~$ 

On the expectation this is similar from 4.2 to 5.0,

> Any idea what could cause that to happen? I can still change my
> password from root, though. I tried running passwd from several other
> users' accounts, and I get the same error message. 

Don't know how you got here for all users, but I found myself in a similar
situation (but with a less obnoxious message) when I for some reason
delete myself as [ordinary] user and then recreated my user account with
the same username.  All my old files were tagged with my old uid, but now 
I had a new one associated with me at login.  (For most purposes, I
believe the numeric uid is the pertinent one for file permissions, and the
text username is just substituted for readable input or output.)

> <rant>
> My first reaction was, "Of course they don't match, you moron. My
> username is "jbayes" and my UID is "500". They're not *supposed* to
> match. Now be a good program and change my password." Stupid
> uninformative error messages... 
> </rant>

The fix (as 'su')  was very easy, since the files were localized in a
couple of well-defined paths: 

# chown <myusername> -R <mydirectorybranch>
# chgrp <mygroupname> -R <mydirectorybranch>

at the tops of each of my old paths.  Worked fine.

It didn't occur to me to try editing my account line in /etc/passwd to the
old uid, so I don't know what wrinkles that might have thrown into
administrative files.

I expect that if you have a more dispersed directory set to deal with, the
judicious use of 'find' would create the list of files you need to ch* on.

DISCLAIMER:  I did this is total ignorance and it worked fine, but I have
no idea how I _should_ have done it, nor what scr*wups I was risking.  It
was just after installing a major kernel change, but I don't recall
exactly what change.

Regards -- jmm
  John M. Mills, Senior Research Engineer   --   john.mills at gtri.gatech.edu
    Georgia Tech Research Institute, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332-0834
          Phone contacts: 404.894.0151 (voice), 404.894.6285 (FAX)
 "The one piece of advice I can give you is, put on sunscreen and wear a hat."
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