Systems may have tens to hundreds of local user accounts, and domains may have hundreds to hundreds of thousands of user accounts. The system probably caches only active users, and getent enumerates those if no /etc/passwd file exists, as it was designed to enumerate only a few entries from local files. As it is, getent will not even enumerate hosts from the local hosts files or resolver.
It appears that mkpasswd enumerates all local and system accounts in the Security Accounts Manager file at $SYSTEMROOT/System32/config/SAM loaded into /proc/registry/HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SAM/, so it probably does the same for domain accounts from Active Directory Domain Service. -- Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada This email may be disturbing to some readers as it contains too much technical detail. Reader discretion is advised. ---- Ok, I understand why it won't display all users, but even when I query for this specific user that exists in the domain - it returns nothing. It only works when I have /etc/passwd file in place (generated by mkpasswd -d), but I was told in a previous thread that I should not use mkpasswd -d anymore, and use getent instead. Is there something I need to do with getent to get access for all my domain users? Should I keep my previous passwd file generated by mkpasswd -d? Thanks
