Re: passwd & group file problems ?

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Thu, 9 Jun 2005, Roy Wiseman wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I work in a corporate environment, with very limited
> internet access, and I want to distribute cygwin to
> some sysadmins who can make good use of these tools. I
> cannot run the cygwin setup across the internet, and I
> do not want to download all the binaries to put on the
> server. We want to package a specific subset of cygwin
> that we require into a package that we can distribute
> to sysadmins. I've done this and it works very well,

I would be a bit cautious in this situation.  It's true that most Cygwin
programs will work just fine when copied from machine to machine.
However, some other things, specifically hard and symbolic links, are
created during the postinstall phase, and may be specific to the
installation machine.  Unless the other machines have exactly the same
configuration, there may be inconsistencies in the copied installation.

You'll also need to replicate the mounts, which I suspect is your current
problem anyway.  Run 'mount -m > /mounts.bat' on the machine you use as
the template installation, and run /mounts.bat after copying.  And you
will need to regenerate /etc/passwd and /etc/group (since that information
is also machine-specific).  You can add the two commands reported
(mkpasswd and mkgroup) to the end of /mounts.bat.

> except for the passwd and group security information
> generation which is tied to the machine the install
> was done on, and I have no idea how to change this.
>
> The message I get on running cygwin.bat on any other
> system but the one where it is installed is :
>
> C:\cygwin>cygwin
> Your group is currently "mkpasswd".  This indicates that
> the /etc/passwd (and possibly /etc/group) files should
> be rebuilt.
> See the man pages for mkpasswd and mkgroup then, for
> example, run
> mkpasswd -l [-d] > /etc/passwd
> mkgroup  -l [-d] > /etc/group
> Note that the -d switch is necessary for domain users.
>
> I expect this is to do with the passwd and group files
> from what I know of unix, and these instructions have
> something to do with the solution, but I have tried
> these commands in every possible way that I can think
> of, but cannot get this error to disappear and
> properly register cygwin for the user. I've tried
> googling and all the commands I can think of, but I'm
> stumped.
>
> Please, can someone tell me how to correct this in the
> cygwin system so that I can distribute it to the
> sysadmins that would like to use these excellent tools?

It would have been better had you followed the instructions in the Cygwin
problem reporting guidelines at <http://cygwin.com/problems.html> and
attached the output of "cygcheck -svr" on the failing system.  Without
that information, the above guess (missing mounts) is all I can offer.

HTH,
	Igor
-- 
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