On Fri, 30 Mar 2018 20:47:20 +0100
James Le Cuirot <chewi@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 30 Mar 2018 20:23:49 +0100
> James Le Cuirot <chewi@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
> > I did just have a lightbulb moment though. I've been playing with
> > unshare recently and I wondered if we could leverage it here.
> > 
> >   $ sudo unshare -m /bin/sh -c "mount --bind /mnt/somewhere/etc /etc && groupadd foo"
> >   groupadd: Cannot determine your user name.  
> 
> Aha! I was trying to do this against an NFS share for a system with a
> different architecture. If I use a local mount with a compatible
> architecture, it actually does work. I'll explore this some more.

Figured it out! The system I was doing this against has an ancient
glibc (long story) with an old nsswitch.conf. I replaced this file with
a newer one and it all started working. Do you agree this could be the
way forwards?

-- 
James Le Cuirot (chewi)
Gentoo Linux Developer