strange uid problem

Staceman · #1 19th June 2007, 04:19 PM

What would cause a process to show it's uid number when doing a "ps aux" instead of it's proper username, when the uid is associated with a username in /etc/passwd?

The processes that do this for me are hanging, and I cannot figure out why, and I believe that the fact that they behave in this manner, is perhaps related to why they only show their uid instead of their username when doing a 'ps aux'.

Any help is appreciated!

hceylan · #2 19th June 2007, 07:34 PM

Hello Staceman,

I do not think this is quite possible but one think I can think of.

If you have copied the binary from another box, which had the user or group as the sticky bit on its permission yet does not exist on the compıter you are currently using.

Just my two pennies...

Hasan Ceylan

Staceman · #3 19th June 2007, 08:10 PM

Interesting...

I'm working with the Microsoft FrontPage Extensions for Linux, on a virtual hosting server. They worked fine for us for a couple years on a RedHat 9 box, and we only started having problems when we moved over to Fedora Core 6. To make it worse, Microsoft EOL'd the Linux version of the FPE a year ago, so no more support from them, or R2R Software, the people who did the port, and the mailing list devoted to the extensions also died.

Another difference on this new server, is that the user directories are now on an NFS share. Though I still don't know for sure, I have a hunch that the problem lies with using the FPE with NFS. We've tried loads of different NFS mounting option combinations, to no avail.

I'm pretty sure that the install program for FPE compiled all of the binaries for the new machine, so even though I'm sure there were some things I copied over from the old system (conf files and the like), the core of the FPE was compiled from source.

Looking over the various files involved with the FrontPage junk, only one binary has any attributes set that are out of the ordinary, and that's the "fpadmcgi.exe" file, which has the setuid bit set, but the docs claim that's kosher.

Also, the UID and username that the binaries run as, is exactly the same as it was on the old system.

A crazy, clusterf**k of a problem. Earlier today, I put the user directories on the local disk of the system, to see if that would solve the problem. So far, so good, the processes no longer hang, although, they still show up on the process list with just their UID. As long as they don't hang, that's fine by me.