Get a list of users with access to the host

Question

I tried to go into /home and list all the subdirectories but it seems that all dirs that are not mine are hidden. I also tried cat /etc/passwd but that didn't list my very own ID I was logged in under. I should also note that my home dir is not physically located on the host but on another network server that hosts everybody's home directories, which are then mounted to all the machines that they have access to. So while dirs like /opt, /var, /etc and so on are physically located on that particular machine, the home dir is on another server.

As a non-root user, is there a way for me to see who all has access to a certain host? OS is Solaris 5.10.

Solution 1

It's likely that

• the list of users come from a network service: probably LDAP, maybe NIS if the network has been around for a very long time;
• the home directories are automounted, i.e. mounted from some file server when the user logs in.

The file /etc/nsswitch.conf defines what sources provide user lists (the passwd setting).

The Solaris commands listusers and login show the list of users. It's possible that not all these users are allowed to log in on this particular machine. Finding out exactly which users are allowed to log in where may require digging deeper in the user databases and in the PAM configuration.

Solution 2

If you don't have read access to /var/adm/wtmpx or the last command on the file server, there aren't many built-in ways to see all users on the system. Also, user accounts may be stored elsewhere such as a directory server.

However, it sounds like you are in a terminal environment. Your home directory is probably mounted as /home/yourname, where /home is a directory on your local host, and yourname is a directory on the remote host. The methods mentioned above will not show any network users, and ls /home will only return any directories you can read in the local host's /home directory. The remote host's user directories will not be exposed in any case in this scenario. This is by design, as Solaris and *nix are multi-user operating systems designed to grant or limit privileges and control access on a per-user level.

Comments

[llua]

sounds like a lack of permissions some sysadmin intended.

[amphibient]

listusers worked, thanks. Do you know what the equivalent of it is in Linux?

[Gilles 'SO- stop being evil']

@foampile getent passwd