I *LOST* /etc/group (damaged)

bArT8472 · 04-21-2008, 03:16 PM

Hi all,
I just logged in to my box via SSH and saw a message:

Code:

id: cannot find name for group ID 0

I started investigating, before I could do anything at all, I noticed that apache is dead.

I've tried the following:

Code:

root@nixion:~# /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload
apache2: bad group name www-data
   ...fail!
root@nixion:~# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
 * Restarting web server apache2
* We failed to correctly shutdown apache, so we're now killing all running apache processes. This is almost certainly suboptimal, so please make sure your system is working as you'd expect now!
apache2: bad group name www-data

It didn't start. Bad group name? What's going on? So I immediately took a look at /etc/group. Before I have even pressed the F3 key which is View in Midnight Commander I noticed that the file is WAY to small (39 bytes). It had only one user inside. This wasn't cause of hacking or anything, I know the probable cause (ISPConfig). Anyway... I just found out that I don't have a recent backup of /etc/group file. I'm using suPHP, so it's a must for me (error 500 otherwise). I recovered a file from October 2007 but many newer sites I have created don't work. Not to mention some other broken stuff. So... is there a way to recreate the /etc/group file, or at least to fetch the user list?

Have a nice day. Thanks in advance!

unSpawn · 04-21-2008, 07:48 PM

The base-passwd package has a basic /etc/group but how basic that is I don't know. You could (back up your old /etc/group and then) 'awk -F':' '{print $1":x:"$4":"}' /etc/passwd > /etc/group', that will be missing some mappings and users but hey, it's a start. Do you by any chance have any /etc/*group* (group-, group.OLD) and gshadow?