GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 608815
users-admin deletes LDAP users from /etc/groups
Last modified: 2010-02-06 11:50:27 UTC
I have a system running Ubuntu Karmic Koala set up to allow LDAP authentication of users. I have added some of those users to some groups using the usermod command, and as expected, looking in /etc/groups they appear on the line for the groups I add them to. After that, running users-admin to add a user or group causes those users to be wiped from /etc/groups. This is, to say the least, not an action I expected; I believe it to be a bug, but if this is actually a feature that can be turned on or off via configuration, I'd greatly appreciate a pointer to instructions on doing so.
Thanks for the report. I've just checked the code and I don't think that's an expected result. What may happen is that LDAP users aren't known, so the GUI could remove them from the list of members of the group. Then the backends remove those users because it believes the GUI wants it. Could you reproduce such a bug when following the instructions for groups at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingGnomeSystemTools Then we should see in the logs whether the users where explicitly removed from the groups or not. BTW, users-admin and the System Tools Backends don't support LDAP users at the moment (as you must have noticed), at best we can make them live side-by-side without conflict.
Created attachment 152890 [details] one of two files for debugging GNOME system tools
The other file, users-admin.log, proved to be empty.
Sorry if I wasn't clear enough: when I said "for groups", I meant using that command: sudo killall /usr/bin/perl; sudo /usr/share/system-tools-backends-2.0/scripts/SystemToolsBackends.pl -m GroupsConfig -v &> ~/stb-groups.log (You can forget users-admin.log id it was empty the first time.)
Hmm, forget about this, I've found where the problem lies in liboobs. We're indeed only adding known users to the group, forcing removal of all non-/etc/passwd ones. I'll see if I can fix that for the next version.
Thank you! We'll stick with the command line in the meantime.
This should be fixed with commit b581b86, which will be released on Monday in 2.29.90. It will be in Ubuntu Lucid. Please test when you can, and reopen if it's not working as expected.