AIX

Hi Friends,

I have created a new user "admin". I would like to use it as root equivalent (can change root password). Now, I want to give uid=0 and gid=0 to act as root. can you help? usermod command is not updating uid.

Code:

/etc/passwd:
root:!:0:0::/:/usr/bin/ksh
admin:!:221:207::/iscp/user/admin:/bin/ksh

using:

Code:

 usermod -u 0 -g 0 admin
3004-692 Error changing "id" to "0" : Account exists.

Thanks,
Suresh

Hi,

a short answer: Using the same UID for more than one user is not possible respectively not allowed.

If you need a user with root-privileges, please look for tools like SUDO or RBAC.

Regards

Sorry to correct you, but it possible and allowed as well. In fact we have the same (IMHO silly, but it wasn't my decision) system in effect at the company i work for right now.

You simply edit "/etc/passwd" directly, using any text editor and set the user-ID there. A "root" user (with the special rights available to this account) is "root" because it has UID 0, not the other way round. Therefore, as soon as any user has UID 0, it is considered to be root(-equivalent), regardless of its name.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Hi Bakunin,

It is my requirement and we have around 300+ servers so it is very difficult to edit passwd file in all servers. Any command line tool / command is available?

Thanks
Suresh

You can use "sed" to edit the file, you do not have to do it manually. To distribute the command you have several options, but none of them "out of the box", without having to set up the procedure:

1) Use ssh-keys to establish passwordless root-login between certain servers (usually one centralized admin-server which is allowed to connect to any other servers). Then use a simple loop to remote-execute the command on a list of servers. This is about as close to the "distributed shell" from the PSSP/Cluster1600 middleware suites as it gets.

2) If you have a centralized HMC you could use this to execute commands as "root" on a list of LPARs.

3) Some centralized monitoring software (for instance HP/OpenView) run local agents on every machine monitored which can be used as a vehicle to execute arbitrary scripts.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

I don't see the problem here. If you can execute the command:

Code:

usermod -g 0 -u 0 admin

on 300+ servers; why can't you execute the command:

Code:

ed -s /etc/passwd <<-"EOF"
	/^\(admin:[^:]*:\)[0-9]*:[0-9]*:/s//\10:0:/
	w
	q
EOF

on those same 300+ servers?

Thank You Dan. It is working....