Comment 19 for bug 240437

I have encountered something very similar to the Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid thread above. However, on Xubuntu 8.10. I found the passwd and groups files trashed (65534 on some IDs). I have all the latest patches installed, of which there have been a lot lately and perhaps this bug.

I added /etc/udev/rules.d/ custom rules file in part trying to run a usb query as non-root as usb devices couldn't be seen without using sudo. I then restarted udev and immediately lost connectivity as hardware drivers were restarted. On rebooting, I've found that eth0 & eth1 were messed up and network-manager thought they were DHCP, and not static as I'd configured. Using ifconfig they **dont appear** unless you explicitly state: ifconfig eth0, and they dont appear in the network-manager applet window. I removed the custom rules file and rebooted and the system is still messed up. Then if I manually configure eth0 then use 'ping' it ends up giving 'sendmsg not permitted' if I ping anything but eth0 ip addr. I dont know if this is related but it started appearing at the same time.

Replacing 65534s with more sensible numbers hasn't recovered much - maybe some system services came back to life - and opening the users & groups GUI still presents an empty list of users, with only root appearing.

I'd be happy to capture what I can but I have to recover this machine asap and dont have backups beyond the /var/backups/passwd and groups files. It seems most of it is intact but its functionality is being compromised by bogus users & permissions so I'm hoping there is a simple fix-up here?

System is running on: http://www.cappuccinopc.com/light-c7.asp