eftychia: Me in poufy shirt, kilt, and Darth Vader mask, playing a bouzouki (vader)
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posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 02:05pm on 2007-03-19 under ,

Error
There are multiple users with the same UID ("0") in the file /etc/passwd.
Correct them manually before running the YaST users module again.

Oh yeah? Pbbbbbbt! There are two users with UID 0 because there are two people with root access to this box, and one prefers bash while the other is much more comfortable with tcsh. Two usernames for root in /etc/passwd differing only in the choice of login shell, quite intentionally, thank you. :-P

Fortunately, I can deal with user/group administration just fine without using YaST -- which is how the second root user got in there. (I remember when I used to do every step by hand, without the use of a newuser/adduser script.) I was just curious how the YaST user administration screens looked and whether they're actually easier for me than doing things the way I'm used to. Which is entirely possible, if YaST doesn't enforce assumptions that get in my way ... er, like this one here.

(Yeah, I know, we shouldn't be logging on as root; we should log in as normal users and use 'su'/'sudo' to do administrative tasks. It's a throwaway installation to get used to this distro, make sure the box works, and play with a couple of packages before deciding exactly where in the network this machine is going to go (most likely meaning: which existing machine it'll be an upgrade for) and doing a detailed configuration to fit that purpose and mesh with the rest of my network. So for the moment, I'm logging in as root -- or rather, as 'rootcsh' -- and not feeling guilty about it.)

There are 7 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
 
posted by [identity profile] unix-vicky.livejournal.com at 07:19pm on 2007-03-19
All my BSD machines (Free- and Net-) have 2 users with UID 0:

root - uses a csh (which may or may not be a link to tcsh)

toor - uses a Bourne (or Bourne-again) shell
 
posted by [identity profile] unix-vicky.livejournal.com at 08:25pm on 2007-03-19
Maybe I should clarify one thing (in case anyone cares):
This is how the BSD default install works, not something I did.
 
posted by [identity profile] dfn-doe.livejournal.com at 07:21pm on 2007-03-19
It's bad form and will probably break some things if you have two users which have the same uuid...

The proper way to do it is to have bother users in the wheel group and then allow wheel to su and/or to use sudo.

 
posted by [identity profile] dfn-doe.livejournal.com at 07:23pm on 2007-03-19
Also, YMMV but I've been very disappointed with the quality of the last 3 or 4 releases of Novell/Suse linux.
 
posted by [identity profile] en-ki.livejournal.com at 08:29pm on 2007-03-19
...unless you use "su -" to keep the environment clean, or you want a normal root user with bash and an alternate root user with a shell that has lots of commands built-in for emergencies, or ...

This is an old-school Unixy way of doing things. There are other ways to do things, but sysadmin software insisting that this is wrong is itself wrong.
 
posted by [identity profile] n5red.livejournal.com at 09:06pm on 2007-03-19
You're using SUSE? Ewww. Novell is doomed and YaST just plain sucks.

My Linux of choice is CentOS, but there are a number of very good options available,
 
posted by [identity profile] syntonic-comma.livejournal.com at 01:30am on 2007-03-20
Sun Microsystems logo 3-d raytracedWe routinely set up Solaris servers with 3 UID=0 accounts: root is sh, rootc is tcsh (used to be csh), and rootk is ksh. I like tcsh; the other admin likes ksh. And you need root to stay sh, just in case things are ever really, really bad – if /usr is gone, so are all the fun shells; and if root's shell doesn't exist, root can't log in.

su - rootc is a lot less bother than su ; tcsh ; source /.tcshrc ; source /.login. And it preserves my command history and directory stack across sessions.

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