Description

Commit fails with error message:  failed to rebuild passwd database

Symptoms

When doing commit, one may see the following error:

user@router# commit
error: failed to rebuild passwd database for /etc/master.passwd
error: foreign reconfiguration failed


One possible root cause could be that the root  partition is full. To verify the status of the file system, issue the following command: 

geg@ankara-re0> show system storage
Filesystem  512-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1a     158174   158120   -12598   109%    /                           # root partition is out of space
devfs               32       32        0   100%    /dev/
/dev/vn0         20072    20072        0   100%    /packages/mnt/jbase
devfs               32       32        0   100%    /dev/
/dev/vn1         51972    51972        0   100%    /packages/mnt/jkernel-6.1-20040112.0
/dev/vn2         25048    25048        0   100%    /packages/mnt/jpfe-M40-6.1-20040112.0
/dev/vn3          3844     3844        0   100%    /packages/mnt/jdocs-6.1-20040112.0
/dev/vn4         23396    23396        0   100%    /packages/mnt/jroute-6.1-20040112.0
/dev/vn5          8900     8900        0   100%    /packages/mnt/jcrypto-6.1-20040112.0
mfs:138        3048670        8  2804770     0%    /tmp
/dev/ad0s1e      23742      410    21434     2%    /config
procfs               8        8        0   100%    /proc
/dev/ad1s1f   19622742   799038 17253886     4%    /var

Solution

If the root partition is full, delete unnecessary files or directories from the root directory (/) to free up some space. After that, commit should succeed.

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