Hi,
I have installed for the first time sun solaris on my pc and I am trying to learn unix.

I created a new user using the following steps:

-create a new group : groupadd work
-created a new user:
useradd -g work -d /export/home -s /usr/bin/ksh gbruno
(i checked the path of the shell using which ksh= /usr/bin/ksh)
-created a password: passwd gbruno( i have entered the password and than reentered)
-message says password succesfully created for user gbruno
-checked the entry in /etc/passwd and gbruno user is there.
-tried to loggin as gbruno : rlogin -l gbruno giuliano( giuliano is my host name)
-I am prompted to insert the password
-once the password is entered i get a message back saying No shell, connection closed.
-If I go to export/home and do ls -l gbruno it says that the owner is 104 and the group is other ( is this correct?).
I tried as per suggestions from uder user to do :
SHELL=statement and reboot in order to create a new shell authomatically.
I deleted old users who were showing the same error messages and created the above new one, but still the same..
What am i doing wrong?

Thanks for your help, I hope I can help somebody else one day..
Regards
Giuliano

Perhaps you picked a shell that is not in the /etc/shells file.

Let's clean up what you have and recreate this user account.

userdel gbruno
rm -rf /export/home
mkdir /export/home
chown 777 /export/home/
echo "* giuliano:export/home/&" >> /etc/auto_home
useradd -g work -s /bin/ksh gbruno
mkdir /export/home/gbruno
cp /etc/skel/local.profile /export/home/gbruno/.profile
chown -R gbruno /export/home/gbruno

If you want to edit the /etc/passwd file, please use the command

/usr/ucb/vipw

Hi David,

Thanks a lot for your suggestions, I think this is the best to do, however when I try to remove export/home with the command you gave me, it says:
unable to remove export/home device is busy.
The sun solaris, I have installed use x_win and a console to login, do you think this is the reason why it says that the device is busy?
Regards
Giuliano

When you get a msg that the device is busy in Solaris, it usually means that there are users currently in that directory (or below it), or that the directory is mounted or shared (NFS mount).

If I remember my admin correctly (it's been awhile), I think /export/home is a directory that is mounted by default when you install Solaris, so unless you partitioned the slices yourself and removed the /export/home partition, that directory is mounted, hence "busy". To remove a mounted or shared directory, you'd have to unmount it first, then remove it. However, I don't believe that you need to remove it (the above post has you recreate it anyway after deleting it). If you want to change permissions on it, you can just chmod it as stated in the above post.

The problem you originally stated, I've seen before, but in my experience it was with FTP users trying to login. I don't use "rlogin", so I can't say it's the same problem, but I suspect it might be. The reason the error occured in my past experience with the FTP users was exactly as the first post stated: that the shell was not in the /etc/shells file. The /etc/shells file is not created automatically when you install Solaris, at least not in Solaris 8 (not sure about 9). It has to be manually created. In it are all the valid system shells that are used by some applications (FTP and sendmail are listed in the docs). So it's possible that rlogin uses that as well. Everything you did looks ok IMO (although your home directory should have been /export/home/gbruno for clarity, but that shouldn't make a diff in the problem you were having). So, my suggestion would be to take a look if you have an /etc/shells file. If you don't, create one with the shells you want to use on your system. The file should look like this:

/usr/bin/ksh
/bin/ksh
/usr/bin/sh
/bin/sh

That's all there is to that file, just a listing of whatever shells you want or need.

Good luck, hope following one of the posts works.

D.O.

BTW - the Solaris admin books are on the net, free. A co-worker of mine got them, not sure where. But if you're interested, do a search for "SA-238" (admin 1) and "SA-288" (admin 2). These are the official Solaris 8 manuals given by Sun to students taking the uber expensive admin courses. Not sure which Solaris you have, but even if it's not the same OE, it would give you some help.