Can't Add New Users (user already exists)

[Dan Grossman]

Greetings,

When AngelNetworkz didn't pay the bill on 200+ servers, mine was among those the datacenter unplugged due to their (not my) non-payment. I went to NAC and got a new server to get back online, this time with Direct Admin. I heard good things.

Anyway, it's been running great for the past 3 days, until today. I ran into one problem I've solved, another I haven't, and they may be related. The problem I haven't solved:

Whenever I try to create a new user (to add another domain to the server, it has about 20 on the shared IP and a couple with their own IPs), it says User Already Exists

Error Creating User img2 Details
User Already Exists
Cannot find a home directory after the system user creation for img2
The home directory for img2 was not created.

img2 was just one try. I've tried different length names, with or without letters, and they're not already used usernames. Why is it not creating new ones? I logged in as root, there's plenty of HD space, and I can create directories in /home fine.

The other problem that I fixed that may be related, since it happened seemingly spontaneously while nobody was on the server... all the sites on the shared IP reverted to the Apache default page. Restarting Apache gave warnings like this:

[warn] VirtualHost 209.123.181.110:443 overlaps with VirtualHost 209.123.181.110:443, the first has precedence, perhaps you need a NameVirtualHost directive
[Fri Sep 3 16:13:09 2004] [warn] VirtualHost 209.123.181.110:80 overlaps with VirtualHost 209.123.181.110:80, the first has precedence, perhaps you need a NameVirtualHost directive
[Fri Sep 3 16:13:09 2004] [warn] VirtualHost 209.123.181.110:443 overlaps with VirtualHost 209.123.181.110:443, the first has precedence, perhaps you need a NameVirtualHost directive

I fixed that by adding NameVirtualHost directives in the main httpd.conf. I don't know why I need them, why it worked for 3 days with the httpd.conf DA wrote, or whether it suddenly not working has to do with the username problem.

Any ideas? Thanks.

 

[DirectAdmin Support]

Hello,

the "user already exists" error will happen when the useradd program retruns an error.

Try running it manually to test it out:

useradd username

and see what happens.

John

 

[Dan Grossman]

The reason it was failing was there was no more space on the / partition. There was plenty in /home but filling / still caused it to break. I had download a 1GB+ backup archive from another server and didn't realize I left it there. Thank you.

 

[teedee]

I am getting this same error but

/dev/hda1 99M 8.5M 86M 10% /boot
/dev/hda2 9.7G 1.9G 7.3G 21% /usr
/dev/hda3 7.7G 732M 6.6G 10% /var
/dev/hda6 2.0G 157M 1.7G 9% /
/dev/hda7 989M 17M 922M 2% /tmp
/dev/hda8 52G 499M 49G 2% /home
/dev/hdb1 74G 33M 70G 1% /backup
none 1014M 0 1014M 0% /dev/shm

ideas ?

 

[jmstacey]

Not all old user information might have been deleted. You will need to go through all configuration files and make sure there aren't any remnants for it. The most likely place it could be is in the bind database.