getpwuid vs. getpwnam

[John Cecere]

This issue has probably been brought up before, but I'll mention it anyway.

I just downloaded and built openssh 3.9p1 on Solaris 8. In my 
environment, I have two root accounts. The normal one and an alternate 
one (rjohn - uid 0) with it's own home directory (/export/home/rjohn). 
After building and installing openssh, I was having trouble getting my 
RSA authentication to work. In investigating it, I noticed that it was 
attempting to use /.ssh/id_rsa.pub as my public key file instead of 
/export/home/rjohn/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.  Digging a little deeper, I found 
that, in the client modules ssh.c and tildexpand.c, it uses the call 
getpwuid(uid) as the basis for determining what the user's home 
directory is. In my case, this resolves to / instead of /export/home/rjohn.

Wouldn't it be more appropriate to use something like 
getpwnam(getenv("LOGNAME")) instead ? Since the login program itself (in 
both Linux and Solaris) sets LOGNAME, it's a reasonably safe assumption 
that it will get set correctly. Even if it's not set, the program could 
check that there's a value in LOGNAME, and if there isn't, fall back to 
using getpwuid.  The login program (in both Linux and Solaris) uses 
getpwnam and not getpwuid to retrieve the passwd information. The 
getpwuid call just looks at the first password entry that has that uid, 
which may not be the one you're looking for. Any thoughts ?

Please respond directly.

Thanks,
John

-- 
John Cecere
Sun Microsystems
732-302-3922 / john.cecere at sun.com