Yeah, watch out for SAs fat fingers. One innocent change in nsswitch.conf from group: files ldap to group: ldap files and consequences could be very unpleasant if group id in files and ldap for dba do not match. I've been through this. It took me a while to figure out 8-) --romas On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 6:43 PM, Jared Still <jkstill@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 1:42 PM, Jared Still <jkstill@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> >> We are setting up a new linux box for Oracle, the following message >> appears when trying to create the dba group: >> >> [root]# groupadd -g 300 dba >> groupadd: group dba exists >> >> > The fix was deceptively simple: > > Do it the old fashioned way by editing /etc/group. > > [root@ordb03 etc]# touch x; chgrp dba x; ls -l x; ls -lsn x > -rw-r--r-- 1 root dba 0 Sep 30 15:42 x > 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 0 300 0 Sep 30 15:42 x > > (dba was set to 300 in /etc/group) > > Thanks for all the suggestions. > > Next time I forget how to do this, it will be documented in Oracle-L > archives. :) > > -- > Jared Still > Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist > >