Where does Lion get its usernames? (former Linux user)
Just some minutes ago, I opened the lid of my Macbook and noticed that something was using the CPU for 50% continuously. When I opened Activity Monitor, the only two CPU-using processes were kernel_task and WindowsServer, but not enough to cover 50%.
Safari also wouldn't respond. Force-quitting worked, but starting it again would show the window but then result in a spinning beachball of death.
When I opened the terminal, the prompt said "I have no name!@macbook$ "
When I typed the command "id", it gave me a user ID (502) but no username!
After killing all apps and mucking about, the CPU suddenly went back to the normal 3-5% usage, and everything worked fine again.
Obviously, something went wrong with the process that does the user identification. As a former Linux user, I'd say the user data resides in /etc/passwd but that's not where it's at. Where does Lion get its usernames and passwords?
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3), Mid-2010 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo