Nonexistent user, continued

Matt Johnston matt at ucc.asn.au
Tue Oct 25 00:16:49 WST 2005


On Mon, Oct 24, 2005 at 07:08:55AM -0700, Yan Seiner wrote:
> When I try to log in via dropbear, I get login attempt for non-existent 
> user from 111.222.333.444:nnnn
> 
> This is the result of running ssh -vvv on the client.  There doesn't 
> appear to be anything useful on the dropbear end other than that message.
> 
> I am not using shadow files, and I've checked that shells and home dirs 
> exist as shown in the /etc/passwd file....

The "login attempt for nonexistent user" warning gets
printed if the call to the standard library getpwnam()
function fails. The username isn't printed in the logs
because quite often it might actually be someone mistakenly
typing a password rather than a username, which shouldn't be
logged.

The standard library doesn't provide any reasons for
getpwnam failure - running "strace -f" on the Dropbear
process (if available) is often insightful for problems like
this though. If you are compiling Dropbear yourself, you
could try compiling with DEBUG_TRACE enabled in debug.h and
running with -v -F -E, though it seems unlikely that a
username other than "root" is actually getting passed to the
server.

Perhaps double check that /etc/passwd and maybe /etc/group
are well formed. What sort of platform are you running on
(OS and libc)?

Let me know how you go.

Cheers,
Matt


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