Re: Any idea why chroot temporarily "cannot find name for group ID 0"?

[Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 12:06:02AM -0700, David Barrett <dbarrett@quinthar.com> was heard to say:
> [root@XXXX svn]# chroot staging/www
> id: cannot find name for group ID 0
> id: cannot find name for group ID 1
> id: cannot find name for group ID 2
> id: cannot find name for group ID 3
> id: cannot find name for group ID 4
> id: cannot find name for group ID 6
> id: cannot find name for group ID 10

  I wonder what you would get while this is happening if you run "strace id";
of course you might have to install strace in the chroot first.  Also,
did you check whether there's anything odd in nsswitch.conf? (I suppose
probably not since you didn't mention setting anything up there, but
it's worth a check)

> Aha!  it's fixed!  30 minutes after the first attempt it's suddenly working.

  What cron jobs are scheduled?  (system jobs as well as user jobs)
Maybe one of them is causing this problem?

  Do you have nscd installed in the chroots or on the main system?

> So one theory is something is changing the permissions of /etc/group and  
> /etc/passwd.  But I can't figure out what that might be.  Next time I'm  
> going to check the permissions first thing.

  It seems unlikely that this is related to your problem.  Your shell
was unable to determine its user name, but it was running as root and
root could read /etc/passwd.

  Daniel