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Subject: RE: ssh ceased to work after recreation of /etc/passwd
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 07:46:00 +0200
Message-ID: <25F7D2213F14794A8767B88203EA2BC9240CBB@mucse201.eu.infineon.com>
From: <FischRon DOT external AT infineon DOT com>
To: <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
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> >It was the other way around. I happened to have an "old" open shell
> >where id was still seen as 400, and *there* did ssh work; but when
> >I closed the window and opened a new shell, my numeric user id is
> >now 121833 and ssh does not work anymore at all.
> 
> 
> Ah-huh.  And did you do what I suggested?

Yes

> >> You'll
> >> probably find that you need to change the ownership of files 
> >> in your home
> >> directory (at least) to enable public key authentication again.
> >
> >You mean: changing all files to owner 121833? That is: 
> Should I do this:
> >
> >  chown -R 121833 ~
> 
> Yep.

Incidentally, this does not work for many files. I get the error message

  chown: changing ownership of ....: Permission denied

This seems to be related to another a problem I am discussing here in
the thread 
with subject line "chmod suddenly ceased to work on old files - NEW
FINDINGS".
chown seems to fail exactly for those files where I also have no
permission to
do a chmod.

> 
> >But for the test of ssh, wouldn't it make more sense to 
> chown the id_rsa
> >file instead? Note that on my system, it is not in ~/.ssh, but in
> >/cygdrive/h/.ssh. So I did a 
> >
> >  chown 121833 /cygdrive/h/.ssh/id_rsa
> 
> And /cygdrive/h isn't your home directory as far as Cygwin is 
> concerned?

It is, but for historical reasons, id_rsa is under /cygdrive/c/.ssh and
I always pass the correct id_rsa via the -i flag of ssh.

> Well, if you've done as I suggested and you're still having 
> problems, it's
> time to run the server in debug mode and see what you get 
> from that.  This
> should tell you pretty clearly why it's not working for you.  
> I find the 
> most convenient way to debug the server is to create a new 
> service that I
> can run instead of the current.  That way I don't have to 
> keep editing 
> the registry or uninstalling and reinstalling.  I use 
> something like this:
> 
> cygrunsrv -I sshd_debug -d "CYGWIN sshd debug" -p 
> /usr/sbin/sshd -a -D -d -d -d 

I don't have a sshd on my machine. I use Windows only as ssh client, in
order to 
access some Unix hosts. 

As I have no root rights on these hosts, it will be difficult to run ssh
in
debug mode there.

I have the feeling that all trouble I'm having, is connected to two 
problems. One is some kind of weird permission problem and means that
I can't chmod some (quite a few actually) files, and that I can't 
chown them (but note that I *can* chown id_rsa!). This symptom suddenly
became evident a few weeks ago.

The second problem is that ssh ceased to work. It ceased to work, as far
as
I can tell, after I had recreated /etc/passwd and /etc/group, and the
most
noticeable difference between the passwd before, and the passwd after,
is
that the user id had changed during recreation.  

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....

Ronald

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