Afriend of mine hit me with this question about a well-horked box at his job at UIUC. It stumped me, so I thought I'd ask around and see if anybody has seen something like it before. > So, when we try to run passwd, we type in the changed password twice, and > we get a "critical error- immediate abort" error. When we try useradd, we > get a "unable to lock password file". So we deleted the etc/passwd.lock > file- no dice. Also, when we try to edit etc/passwd using vi, we get a > "error writing to swap file" error, but we're still able to modify the > file. Also, when using the config manager in X, we're not able to "save" > any new users or groups. We're using RedHat Linux 5.1 on a Gateway PII > 400 with win95 on the other partitions. I told him to double-check free space on the partition holding /etc, and make sure that root still has write perms to /etc, but other than that I have no clue. Please, someone, help me figure out what these folks have done to their poor box! :) TIA for any help, -- <----------------------------------------------------------------------> Chris H. Bidler cbidler at talkware.net Associate Engineer, Applications Group Universal Talkware Corp. "In any event, is a O^(log N) search that returns the wrong answer really better than an O^N search that returns the right answer?" <----------------------------------------------------------------------> --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: tclug-list-unsubscribe at mn-linux.org For additional commands, e-mail: tclug-list-help at mn-linux.org