SamMaEl wrote:
> 
> 	Well, after totally wiping my root partition and reinstalling 1.3B
> over that, I guess something is wrong... because I am STILL getting the
> SAME error.
> 
> </var/log/messages extract>
> 
> hobbes ls: /etc/pwd.db: Permission denied
> hobbes id: /etc/pwd.db: Permission denied
> hobbes id: /etc/pwd.db: Permission denied
> 
> <end log>

what does an "ls -l /etc/pwd.db" as root give you?
 
> 	When I create a user-level account, things go fine... I'm using an
> adduser script I found on the amiga archives. Until about a week ago I had
> NEVER had a problem. I wrote about this problem earlier.... all of a
> sudden none of my users could login properly. Login couldn't source their
> shell's .rc files, they had no access to their home directories, and when
> they did a 'whoami' or 'id' or 'ls -l' or anything showing a group or
> username would NOT show the name, but the number. And one of the entries
> as above would appear in the logs.

my guess would be that the adduser script you are using is screwing things
up.  i'd go back to adding users by hand.

> 	It's not a SUPER big deal... it's basically a private system, but
> I like to use a user-level account most of the time, so I don't
> accidentally screw something up ;-) I can try re-installing my /etc files.
> I did that at first bootup, but some of the files may have gotten written
> over. But, the master.passwd and the .db files were all 'stock 1.3B' as
> they came. The only things that I kept were my networking setup files, and
> anything NOT in the etc.tgz file. But, I would appreciate any hints as to
> what may be the problem.

what does your /etc/passwd look like?  does it look the same as
/etc/master.passwd except for the lack of encrypted passwords?

> 	All I have modified so far was installed the X stuff, and a few
> other programs (pine, lynx, top, hfsutils, apache, perl5 and dt) and
> installed the kernel sources tarball. I just now used adduser to add my
> user account, and when I logged in it couldn't find /home/sammael. So, I
> looked in /home and sammael/ was there. I did a ls -l and instead of my
> login name 'sammael' showing up in the uid bit, my uid number 1001 did.
> And, I got the same error message in the logs as before. 8-(
> 
> 	THanks in advance for any advice or suggestions... I'm COMPLETELY
> stumped on this one. Unless there is some weird bug involving files in
> /etc, like the name server or PPP files, I have NO idea what this could
> be. I even wiped the partition with Mkfs before re-installing. 

if i were you, i'd wipe /etc/master.passwd and /etc/passwd, as well as
their .db files, and then reinstall them from the etc.tgz set.  then read
adduser(8) and add users by hand.

i hope this helps.

later.

-- 
Colin Wood                                 cwood@ichips.intel.com
Component Design Engineer - MD6                 Intel Corporation
-----------------------------------------------------------------
I speak only on my own behalf, not for my employer.