From owner-freebsd-questions Thu May 2 11:28:56 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from speicher.org (sirius.speicher.org [209.74.10.51]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AA30F37B416 for ; Thu, 2 May 2002 11:28:48 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (geoff@localhost) by speicher.org (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g42IUSo42516; Thu, 2 May 2002 14:30:29 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from geoff@speicher.org) Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 14:30:28 -0400 (EDT) From: "Geoffrey C. Speicher" To: Stephen Hovey Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: concurrent pw(8) corrupts master.passwd sometimes? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Thu, 2 May 2002, Stephen Hovey wrote: > I had trouble like this with the YP stuff - if two people changed their > passwords or something at the same time, etc. > > I put my own locking in so that if something is in process it doesnt even > try to run. How much code do pw and the YP utils use in common? This is an excerpt from the BUGS section of pw(8): There are the obvious races with multiple people running pwd_mkdb on dif- ferent password files at the same time. The front-ends to pwd_mkdb, chpass(1), passwd(1) and vipw(8), handle the locking necessary to avoid this problem. Isn't pw(8) conspicuously missing from that list? > if it were me - I would change the method to create a file of pw commands, > that a cronjob checks for an executes evern so many minutes IF a lockfile > doesnt exit (so worst case it takes an extra 5 minutes before an account > is created). Good idea. It may come to that if I can't fix it the right way. Geoff To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message