Solaris 10 adduser

Brain teaser,

I was given the task below. I believe the consultant runs software on his laptop that probes our QA tier web servers for xxx The two web servers are xxx

I attempt useradd command on XXX which seems to work, but when I attempt to assign a pwd, the OS denies it and says user doesn't exist.

myserver# useradd -c "test user" -d /export/home/xxxxxx -m xxxxxx
root@myserver# passwd xxxxx
passwd: User unknown: xxxxxx
Permission denied

I look in /etc/shadow and /etc/passwd and the 'xxxxxx' acct is not found. ( / root partition is not 100%.)

I do the same command on the other server and it works as designed: new acct exists and pwd can be modified.

I've looked in /var/adm logs for some type of error, but I don't see any.

Help appreciated

Is there an automounter running?

What Solaris platform and version is this?

This sounds familiar but I haven't come across it recently so you may get more informed replies to you post.

I think the 'adduser' script tries to create the new users home directory first and if there's an automounter in use, it is denied permission to do that. The adduser script then aborts and doesn't complete (ie, do the other necessary stuff).

I would try to create the new users home directory yourself and include in the automounter 'home' directories file, and when that's done, run adduser again without the -d switch.

Hope that helps.