Where does Lion get its usernames? (former Linux user)

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Bart1977 Author

Level 2

287 points

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

Posted on Apr 15, 2012 4:28 AM

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Answer 1

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,042 points

Apr 15, 2012 4:33 AM in response to Bart1977

id returns the User ID number.

id -un returns the user name.

The Directory Services manages user accounts in Lion. The command line utility for Directory Services is dscl.

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Answer 2

Bart1977 Author

Level 2

287 points

Apr 15, 2012 5:20 AM in response to Barney-15E

OK thanks for the DSCL tip. I've found another thread with the same symptoms:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3663559

The logs of the opendirectoryd process show that it restarted itself (from /var/log/opendirectoryd.log):

2012-04-15 13:26:56.346 CEST - Loaded bundle at path .....

The system logs show a couple of errors from coreservicesd:

Apr 15 13:03:32 macbook coreservicesd[31]: _scserver_ServerCheckin: client uid validation failure; getpwuid(502) == NULL

And then thousands of these two lines follow:

Apr 15 13:03:43 macbook xpchelper[95253]: getpwuid_r() failed for UID: 502, ret: 0, errno: 0

Apr 15 13:03:43 macbook com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.xpchelper.F6010000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000[95253]): Exited with code: 1

Let's see if it happens again in the future. I'm logging this for reference and Google.

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Answer 3

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,042 points

Apr 15, 2012 5:31 AM in response to Bart1977

I don't know much about xpchelper, but it does appear that directory services did fail for some reason and the system didn't handle that very gracefully.

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