SUMMARY: Empty passwd, group and shadow files

Thanks to all who responded.

Most had part of the solution, the complete fix was:

Because the system disks are mirrored ("/", swap, /export/home, etc.)
the files on both paritions (primary and mirror) need to be identical.  
Fixing passwd, group and shadow on only one of the paritions and then
booting wasn't pretty.  I needed to do the following:

1.  boot cdrom -s
2.  fsck /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0              <= primary
3.  fsck /dev/dsk/c0t8d0s0              <= mirror
4. mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /mnt
5. mount /dev/dsk/c0t8d0s0 /a
6. cd /mnt/etc
7. cp passwd.last passwd
    cp group.last group
    cp shadow.last shadow
8. cd /a/etc
8. cp passwd.last passwd
     cp group.last group
     cp shadow.last shadow
  9. cd
10. umount /a
11. umount /mnt
12. sync;sync
13. either reboot or halt and boot from the ok prompt.

I agree that NIS (or something similar) would be a much better
solution.  

I also liked the comment from David Harrington,
 
"if I ever mess around with a root entry in a password file, I have
learned to always be remotely logged in in a separate window so that I
can
test what I have done, yet retain access to the machine I am messing
with."  

Thanks all,

Dave

==========================================================================================
Original Post:

Hello:
        I find that each of these files are zero length.  There is a
non-root user logged into the console.  I cannot su to root or
rlogin/telnet to the box from another server.  Solaris 8, E250 with 6
internal drives, system mirrored using SDS.  This is one of serveral
boxes in a workgroup.  The way that I keep the passwd/group/shadow files
in sync after changes is to make the changes to one system and then ftp
the three files to each of the other systems (I make a backup copy on
each system first).  Obvious that the ftp to this particular box didn't
work as it should (from now on, I'll need to verify that the files were
copied in ok prior to exiting from each box).  I can't even halt the
box, so I think the procedure is:

- power off,
- boot from cdrom
- create temporary mount point, call it /mnt
- mount the root parition on system disk to /mnt
- copy the backed up passwd, group and shadow files back in
- halt
- reboot

I'm just wondering if I'll have any problem mounting the root partition
because of SDS.  Any input is welcome.  I will summarize.

Thanks
Dave
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