Subject: RE: ssh ceased to work after recreation of /etc/passwd
From: Larry Hall <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 22:36:35 -0400

At 03:22 PM 7/13/2005, Igor wrote:
>On Wed, 13 Jul 2005, Larry Hall wrote:
>
>> At 01:46 AM 7/13/2005, FischRon.external wrote:
>>
>> >So what I did is to manually edit /etc/passwd and set my user id back
>> >to 400. Then I opened a new cygwin shell and, voila, ssh works again.
>> >
>> >Now the question is: What possible damage to my system could I have
>> >introduced by manually changing the uid for my account in /etc/passwd?
>> >After all, I'm always a bit reluctant to hack around in my passwd
>> >file....
>>
>> I expect you won't want to keep it this way but doing this for now is
>> fine. It just means the POSIX UID that Cygwin knows you as isn't the
>> same as Windows.  This will mean that POSIX permissions that Cygwin
>> creates on new files will be 400 instead of that of your domain user, so
>> there may be more files to "fix" once your general permission issue is
>> resolved.
>
>Sorry, but no.  Cygwin simply converts POSIX permission bits to the
>appropriate Windows ACLs.  The ACLs, of course, don't know anything about
>the Cygwin UIDs, and go by the SID.  So, as long as the SID is the same,
>nothing will change.

That's true.  It's the "as long as" that I was accounting for.  As far as 
I can tell, Ronald has only ever posted his '/etc/passwd' entry after 
running 'mkpasswd' as his domain login (or connected to the domain).  So
I'm not completely sure that his original SID and his current one are the
same.  But, that said, it's certainly true that if his UID is now 400 and
his SID is set to his domain personna, then there shouldn't really be 
further troubles, beyond the annoyance of having Cygwin think his UID is
UNKNOWN_UID (400).  

--
Larry Hall                              http://www.rfk.com
RFK Partners, Inc.                      (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office
838 Washington Street                   (508) 893-9889 - FAX
Holliston, MA 01746                     

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