Since some time back, not sure when it began, my 9.2-RELEASE-p12 amd64 server's periodic/weekly output has said:
This comes from /etc/periodic/weekly/310.locate which tries to
When I started investigating, I noticed I can not even
As far as I can see, the nobody user exists:
and /nonexistent is just that, nonexistent:
The locate.database, the target of the periodic script, exists and is owned by 65534 (it's possible to
What can be the cause for this?
Code:
Rebuilding locate database:
chown: nobody: illegal user name
su: unknown login: nobody
This comes from /etc/periodic/weekly/310.locate which tries to
chown
the locate database to nobody:
Code:
[root@aknot /etc]# grep nobody /etc/periodic/weekly/310.locate
chown nobody $locdb || rc=3
echo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb | nice -n 5 su -fm nobody || rc=3
When I started investigating, I noticed I can not even
chown
an arbitrary file to nobody:
Code:
[root@aknot /tmp]# touch /tmp/myfile
[root@aknot /tmp]# chown nobody /tmp/myfile
chown: nobody: illegal user name
As far as I can see, the nobody user exists:
Code:
[root@aknot /etc]# grep nobody /etc/passwd /etc/group
/etc/passwd:nobody:*:65534:65534:Unprivileged user:/nonexistent:/usr/sbin/nologin
/etc/group:nobody:*:65534:
Code:
[root@aknot /etc]# ls -l /nonexistent
ls: /nonexistent: No such file or directory
The locate.database, the target of the periodic script, exists and is owned by 65534 (it's possible to
chown
anything to numerical uid 65534), but as demonstrated, I can't use the nobody name with chown
.
Code:
[root@aknot /var/db]# ls -l /var/db/locate.database
-r--r--r-- 1 65534 wheel 16313969 Oct 5 22:49 /var/db/locate.database
What can be the cause for this?