Problems with Debian-based minimal rootfs

[Matt Porter <mmporter@home.com>]

Hi,

I am building a minimal rootfs that will loads as a large ramdisk when
booting some nodes on a clustered system.  I'm basically pulling pieces by
hand from a working PowerPC potato system as each node is PowerPC-based.
I only have the need to allow serial login and networking (rshd etc) so
I've stripped a lot of the sysvinit scripts out.  It has /etc/init.d/rc
and rcS.  It then has checkroot.sh, checkfs.sh, and bootmisc.sh running in
the single user runlevel.  In runlevel 2, I just run the network scripts.

The problem is that applications making use getpwnam() and friends can't
seem to parse my /etc/passwd (even though it is good, ripped out my
example system).  When bootmisc.sh attempts to chmod the tty* devices to
root.tty, it complains about an unknown user.  Further, /bin/login
complains that any user I enter is invalid and unknown.  I know this must
be something really trivial that I'm missing.  I've attached a dump of my
errors below.  Thanks for any help or suggestions.

--snip--

RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
Freeing unused kernel memory: 64k init 4k pmac 8k open firmware
INIT: version 2.76 booting
Fast boot, no file system check
Cleaning: /tmp /var/lock /var/run.
chown: root:tty: invalid user
INIT: Entering runlevel: 2
Setting up IP spoofing protection...done.
Starting base networking daemons: inetd.

(none) login: root
Password:
login[47]: invalid password for `UNKNOWN' on `ttyS0'

Login incorrect

(none) login: demo
Password:
login[47]: invalid password for `UNKNOWN' on `ttyS0'

Login incorrect

(none) login:  

--
Matt Porter
mmporter@home.com
This is Linux Country. On a quiet night, you can hear Windows reboot.