podman: podman exec: Error: unable to find user $USER: no matching entries in passwd file

Is this a BUG REPORT or FEATURE REQUEST? (leave only one on its own line)

/kind bug

Description

Trying to exec into a container with ‘-u $USER’ fails to look up the user that is automatically added by --userns=keep-id --user root:root

Steps to reproduce the issue:

in one terminal:

$ podman run  --userns=keep-id --user root:root -it --rm --name foof registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora:32 /bin/bash

in another terminal:

$ podman exec -it -u $USER foof /bin/bash
Error: unable to find user otaylor: no matching entries in passwd file

Additional information you deem important (e.g. issue happens only occasionally):

This is a distillation of a problem toolbox triggers; I see this on Fedora Silverblue rawhide, @mheon was able to reproduce on his system

Output of podman version:

Version: 2.1.0-dev API Version: 1 Go Version: go1.14.3 Built: Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969 OS/Arch: linux/amd64

About this issue

  • Original URL
  • State: closed
  • Created 4 years ago
  • Comments: 19 (16 by maintainers)

Commits related to this issue

Most upvoted comments

I’m going to reopen because we only partially solved this.

We can definitely edit /etc/passwd in the image. That does not work in the read-only case, but that would also make it impossible to add users, so we could still use the old approach.