On Thu, 1 Dec 2005, dieter Roelants wrote:
> Hmm, indeed. It's probably useful to notice that I booted and mounted 
> everything from an other-endian system (sparc). More, if I mount a directory 
> with extracted base and etc (RC5 sets) from my (x86) laptop and chroot to 
> that, uids are not swapped.
>
> Can somebody confirm this is cobalt or mipsel specific? Chrooting to an nfs 
> mounted dir from the sparc on my laptop doesn't show the same problem 
> (although my laptop runs -current, I have no clue if that matters).

Sounds like /etc/{s,}pwd.db are endian-specific
(which are the binary versions of /etc/master.passwd and /etc/passwd, see 
pwd_mkdb(8) and vipw(8))

  - Hubert