account creation failed (unable to add group)

[AL-Kateb]

Hello everybody,

i have this problem being unable to create new accounts because i get this error "unable to ad group ABC"

i did some search in the forums and noticed some are having this problem because of the nscd and it worked for them when shutting down this service! but i don't have it running anyway so it was not the problem.

so i tried /scripts/upcp --force and it did not work neither did rebooting the server

someone said remove the group.lock file and it did not help

i searched everywhere to figure what could be the problem and i found nothing and nothing in the error_log as well.

i suspect some files were deleted due to some script i tested the other day but i thought updating cPanel should fix it.

isn't there a way to print out what's happening during the account creation? something to know why this is happening?

thanks

 

[cPanelTristan]

Is your machine running on Virtuozzo? If so, it could be quotaugidlimit that is limiting the number of users you can create. The setting is on the main VPS node by the provider of the machine. There would be a QoS table and disk quota parameters.

The most noticeable way to know if it is that limit on a Virtuozzo box would be if you try to create an account, it will create partially but be empty for /home/username upon creation, then the /home/username folder will be owned by root. When you try to chown the empty folder, you'll get this error:

chown: changing ownership of `/home/username': Disk quota exceeded

If this machine is not a VPS, then try viewing /usr/local/cpanel/logs/error_log on the account creation:

tail -f /usr/local/cpanel/logs/error_log

Then paste the output of the exact error message received.

 

[AL-Kateb]

It's not a VPS it's a dedicated server and there is no problem with quota or anything but i assume some files might be missing and it's possible.

this is not reporting any error to the cPanel error_log

btw i found out this isn't cPanel problem! it's the system's problem i am even not able to to add groups or users using useradd and groupadd commands.

can't figure out why though, the server is prett much messed up i guess I will do re-installation but i wanted to know how to solve this if it happens to me again one day by any chance.

 

[cPanelTristan]

Try an strace to see where it fails:

strace -vvf -s 4096 -o /root/strace.adduser adduser newuser

You are going to have a lot of output from this at /root/strace.adduser, so you might want to review this presentation on how to interpret strace output:

Advanced cPanel Troubleshooting with Strace - cPanel Inc.