Re: Problem w/ cron

["Pierre A. Humblet" <pierre at phumblet dot no-ip dot org>]

Brian Ford wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 23 Oct 2003, Pierre A. Humblet wrote:
> 
> > OK, thanks, but you are not answering my question about ls -ln and not
> > following http://cygwin.com/problems.html
> >
> Well, he sort of did both here:
> 
> http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2003-10/msg01482.html
> 
> did you miss that, or maybe you could be more clear about what is still
> missing, as I don't understand.

It's OK now, I got it late.

The password entry is
Administrator:unused_by_nt/2000/xp:500:513:U-IBM-VNYWG3WG0KP\Administrator,
S-1-5-21-1844237615-1563985344-1060284298-500:/cygdrive/c/Documents
and Settings/Administrator.IBM-NMR31UMZNAJ:/bin/bash

COMPUTERNAME = `IBM-77F39HCSY41'
HOMEPATH = `\Documents and Settings\Administrator.IBM-NMR31UMZNAJ
LOGONSERVER = `\\IBM-77F39HCSY41'
USERDOMAIN = `IBM-77F39HCSY41'
USERNAME = `Administrator'

Jeremy is the beneficiary/victim of name aliasing.

He is logged in Windows as IBM-77F39HCSY41\Administrator,
for which there is no password entry. Normally Cygwin would then
create a default entry and assign the group 'mkpasswd', but for 
historical reasons (Read: if we change that, users will complain)
it discovers that there is a user named Administrator at it uses 
that password entry (that's useful to share HOME between users 
with the same name).

However when cron runs, it looks up Administrator in /etc/passwd
and it finds IBM-VNYWG3WG0KP\Administrator. cron impersonates
that Administrator, which is another user without access rights 
to the file in question. 

So the fix involves running mkpasswd -l and adding an entry for 
IBM-77F39HCSY41\Administrator. It's likely that it's also necessary
to run mkgroup -l to add local groups.

It's OK to keep the entry for IBM-VNYWG3WG0KP\Administrator, but the
two Administrator entries must have different cygwin user names
(the first field) because crontabs are identified by cygwin user names
and they must be unique to avoid yet another aliasing problem.

Pierre

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