[HARDY] Users and Groups deleted loads of groups!

[Caroline Ford]

I was asked to create a new user to test a nautilus bug and Users and Groups seems to have failed catastrophically.

I made a user tester, gave it a password and then pressed return as this laptop is stuck in 800x600 (due to another bug) and I couldn't see any OK type buttons to confirm. When the applet returned to the initial window there was no sign of a user tester in the list. Closing the applet and restarting it gave me the same window with no users listed, and the unlock button didn't do anything.

I went looking in the syslogs and found this:

auth.log shows that the applet went on a deletion spree!

Trying to load synaptic failed as user root is not known to the system!

[Caroline Ford (secretlondon)]

Unknown -> nautilus

Couldn't find anything that looked like users and groups, so presuming nautilus itself

[Albert Damen (albrt)]

Confirmed, also after using Users & Groups.
Recovered by using passwd, shadow and group files from a live session.

[Albert Damen (albrt)]

Users and Groups = users-admin and comes from gnome-system-tools

[Caroline Ford (secretlondon)]

gnome-system-tools 2.21.5.1-0ubuntu1

[Caroline Ford (secretlondon)]

policykit is 0.7-2ubuntu3 if this is connected

[Caroline Ford (secretlondon)]

It looks like all current users and groups are deleted and then a group (not a user) is made with the name of the wanted user.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=496213 is a bug in 2.20.x concerning making a group not a user.

[Caroline Ford (secretlondon)]

As I had to reinstall as a result of this bug (no live Hardy CD to hand) I've tested with Hardy alpha 3 which has gnome-system-tools 2.21.3-0ubuntu1. The bug did not happen - but users-admin did crash.

So.. this bug occurs as a result of changes between 2.21.3-0ubuntu1 and 2.21.5.1-0ubuntu1?

[Caroline Ford (secretlondon)]

There are two releases upstream since 2.21.5.1 - 2.21.5 and 2.21.90. I don't see anything in the changelogs that indicate that they know about this bug, nevermind fixed it.

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnome-system-tools/2.21/gnome-system-tools-2.21.90.news

[Caroline Ford (secretlondon)]

Internally it uses liboobs

https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/liboobs/

2.21.5-0ubuntu1 is current hardy version. 2.21.3-0ubuntu2 is the version in alpha 3.

system-tools-backends

2.5.6-0ubuntu1 is current hardy, 2.5.4-0ubuntu1 in alpha 3.

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort (pochu)]

Caroline,

Does this still happen with the system-tools-backends, liboobs and gnome-system-tools updates?

[Caroline Ford (secretlondon)]

I think this is fixed now :)

I can't reproduce it any more.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

I'm going to go ahead and set the status of this bug report to Invalid then as it has not been recreated. I spent some time trying to recreate it myself and was unsuccessful. Additionally, albert and I talked about this bug on #ubuntu-bugs and I never heard back about his efforts to recreate it. I'm leaving myself subscribed to the bug to keep and eye on it. Thanks!

[Albert Damen (albrt)]

I have not been able to recreate the bug on the affected system. Although the passwd, group and shadow files from a live session were sufficient to get access and sudo rights again, the user and group id's didn't match the affected system. I couldn't create a new user anymore.
Also on the new installed system I made yesterday I could not reproduce this.
The only concern I have is that this bug did occur on two independent systems and the effects are quite disastrous. I wouldn't like to see this bug slip in Hardy release.

NB: in case someone does get hit by this bug later, I just found we have daily backups of passwd, group and shadow files in /var/backups.

[Caroline Ford (secretlondon)]

Shouldn't this be fix released - it certainly existed so not really invalid.

Doesn't setting it to invalid make it disappear?

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

I'm not certain what you mean by disappear. The default searches in Launchpad only return "Open" bug reports where "Open" is every status except Invalid, Won't Fix and Fix Released. So it could be considered to disappear either way. Also when a user submits a new bug report Launchpad will return bugs that are Invalid and Fix Released when asking is your bug one of these. So I think Invalid is appropriate in this particular case as we are uncertain as to what the root cause was and it the exact fix is unknown.