Posts Tagged “active directory”

ps showing UID instead of username

May 13th, 2008 - Posted by: Len in Technology, tags: ,

I noticed something a bit odd on the Active Directory integrated Linux systems I run at work. When listing all of the running processes with “ps auxw”, the output would display the following:

root      3964  0.0  0.0   3060   688 tty6     Ss+  May07   0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty6
10010     5091  0.0  0.0   9980  2344 pts/0    Ss   08:26   0:00 -bash
bmartin   5592  0.0  0.0  35768  2524 ?        S    09:39   0:00 pure-ftpd (IDLE)
wwwrun   30349  0.0  0.1 176992  6508 ?        S    May12   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd2-prefork

Looks pretty normal except for that second line where the user-id number is displayed instead of my proper user-name (lgoldenstein). I figured this might be caused by problems between Linux and the Active Directory user mappings. However, other Active Directory accounts display correctly in the ps output.

Some Google searching found the solution:
ps will only display the username if the username is eight characters or less. Otherwise, the user-id will be displayed.

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