Beware the Ides of etc-update! -Mandriva

[rolf]

This is just a short tale illuminating one potential pitfall of system administration. Backstory:

• The arrival of 2011 on this machine was attended by much pain.
• There has been a sort of occasional malaise when I try to install or uninstall with package management
• and now, for the life of me, I can't get glx to load for the proprietary dkms-nvidia driver, even though it works in the same machine on Bernie Lomax and Rosa 2012ltd.

Daily growing closer to the conclusion that reinstalling is the only solution, I thought of the widely used practice to package new default configurations as .rpmnew files in updates. Google showed some info, including helpful bash way to find them: find / -print | egrep "rpmnew$|rpmsave$" and the actual mandriva script for making it easy, etc-update

So, feeling resigned to "nothing to lose", I ran etc-update, which presented two .rpmnew files, one at a time, with some choices, similar to:

Run the command etc-update
You'll see a list of changed config files. For each file, you can:

1. Use the whole .rpmnew file as the working file
2. Merge the update
   
3. Discard the update
   
4. Partially (interactively) merge the update
   
5. Ignore the update
   and I'll add one I saw in terminal
6. Quit etc-update

My two files were /etc/passwd and /etc/groups and BAM!, I chose #1 for each. Next, I opened a new terminal tab and, instead of the normal bash prompt, there were excited warnings and a new prompt:

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I have no name!I have no name!
I have no name!
[I have no name!@localhost]$

Also, something about uid 501 (my uid) having no user. First, I tried to su to root but the root password was not recognized. Then, since it was lucky I already had a root login on the tab where I ran etc-update,

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[root@localhost rolf]# usermod -u 501 rolf

The news, here, was user rolf did not exist. Finally, I noticed etc-update had made /etc/passwd- and /etc/group- backups.
So, next try was to

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[root@localhost rolf]# cp /etc/passwd /etc/passwd.f*ck
[root@localhost rolf]# cp /etc/passwd- /etc/passwd


Being careful not to discard anything, with a vowel who shall remain nameless in place of *.
At this point, I had my user prompt back in new shells but there was a problem with my group id, so

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[root@localhost rolf]# cp /etc/group /etc/group.f*ck
[root@localhost rolf]# cp /etc/group- /etc/group


and, bingo-bango, all is back as it was, afaict. So, while this is not guru-level information and there have got to be better-informed ways of dealing with .rpmnew files, beware the ides of etc-update, gentle grasshopper!

[viking60]

Good find - I think I have heard about others having such a problem too.

[dedanna1029]

So that's what that was... thanks. I just gave up.and threw Mint back on. Needed it to work, wasn't interested in fixing.