[nmglug] Group file altered

[Tom Rushton]

Combining the suggestions from Sam, Gary, and Mars almost got me there.  
Each suggestion allowed me to figure out several more of the group ids.  
But I eventually broke down and reinstalled.  Comparing the resulting 
group file to what I had managed to piece together showed me that I had 
achieved about an 85% success rate, but it wasn't good enough to restore 
full functionality.  Fortunately, I had a backup of the home directory 
and didn't lose anything but time.  I learned a lot in the process, 
though, including the importance of backups.  Thanks to Sam, Gary, and 
Mars for the suggestions.
~Tom Rushton

Mars DeLapp wrote:
> Sam Noble wrote:
>> man:x:12:
>
> This got turned into a url by Thunderbird.
>
> That clued me in to try man:xine as a URL in Konqueror. That brings up 
> the man page for xine.
>
> Sweet! An easy way to access man pages
>
> OK back to the subject at hand; (Assuming all the Ubuntu GID policies 
> are inherited from Debian) system group numbers 0-99 are statically 
> allocated to a particular package. System group numbers 100-999 are 
> dynamically allocated as packages are installed. See "9.2 Users and 
> groups" at:
> http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-opersys.html
>
> If you installed all your packages in the same order that Tom did on 
> his system, then using his /etc/group file should be OK. Otherwise you 
> need to deal with figuring out the appropriate group name and GID 
> associations for all the GIDs 100-999. I estimate there are about 20 
> of them based on my /etc/group file.
>
> Here is how I would go about fixing the problem.
>
> Reinstall base-passwd package. That should fix the 0-99 groups.
>
> Now search for GID numbers 100 to 130 using find
>
> ~# find / -gid 100 -ls
>
> then try to figure out what group the files should belong to.
>
> Mars
>