Unable to fetch User name mapping information from passwd and group file

Recently we got a case where customer was having issue fetching the maps from the group and passwd file. Customer was trying to configure maps on a Windows 2003 R2 box.

While troubleshooting, we did check the below things:

1. User name mapping service (properties- General\log on\dependencies)

2. File version for mapavc.exe

3. Unix user source (It was fetching the passwd and group file from remote location)

4. Map refresh interval was set to 1 hour. We changed it to 1 day.

5. Entries on the passwd and group file ( at times due to incorrect entries the issue can come)

Everything seems to be fine and good. But when we go the option User maps => “create maps” => list UNIX user, it was listing only ‘-2’ gid.

Then we copied the user map locally on to the desktop and reconfigured User name mapping. Still the same issue.

So we tried with one user entry on the passwd file and still the same issue.

Then we copied the group file locally on to the desktop and reconfigured User name mapping to fetch maps (user and group) from local machine. Then we synchronized the settings.

After that we were able to user and group maps information and the configured them.

Conclusion:

User and group maps have to be present locally and cannot be configured from remote location.

We need to fix both the user as well as the group maps in order to configure User mapping.