I've been playing around with a Solaris 11 system, where I've made several user-accounts for myself.  Anyway, I gave one of my unprivileged account the solaris.* auth, and then tried to give another unprivileged account the System Administrator profile:user$ authssolaris.*user$ pfexec usermod -P+System Administrator user2This failed with the following error-message (yes, repeated three times):/usr/lib/passmgmt: Password file(s) busy.  Try again later/usr/lib/passmgmt: Password file(s) busy.  Try again later/usr/lib/passmgmt: Password file(s) busy.  Try again laterI've tried again later - even after just rebooting - and each time I've get the same result.  This is a completely different error than when a user without the solaris.* (or one of the assign-auths) tries the command.  I've also tried to explicitly add auths regarding assigning profiles, auths and roles - eg. solaris.profile.assign - in addition to solaris.* (like how solaris.grant had to be explicitly assigned); but that didn't help (nor show up when I did a auths - only solaris.* showed). I have however successfully used usermod to assign these things while root or while using a user with the Primary Administrator profile (I copy-pasted in from a previous Solaris-version).However I really thought solaris.* - or for that matter just the solaris.profile.assign - ought to have been enough to use usermod to give privileges to other users...  So what does the (triple) error-message mean?  Why doesn't it work?  And if it shouldn't work, why not?  And what would be the correct least combination of auths and/or profiles to make it work?
/usr/lib/passmgmt: Password file(s) busy. Try again later in Solaris 11
users;solaris;privileges
Why doesn't it work?The error messages/usr/lib/passmgmt: Password file(s) busy.  Try again later/usr/lib/passmgmt: Password file(s) busy.  Try again later/usr/lib/passmgmt: Password file(s) busy.  Try again laterlikely mean you don't have permission to create a file in /etc.The only source of that error message that I can find is in the passmgmt source code and is generated when passmgmt fails either to create the file /etc/.pwd.lock or can not actually lock the file if it already exists.passmgmt, and likely many other Solaris utilities, attempt to lock the password files with an /etc/.pwd.lock file.  (source code link for locking the password files).Given that you can successfully use usermod while root, this doesn't look like a problem where an errant process holds a lock on /etc/.pwd.lock, so the only failure per the published Illumos source (admittedly a bit out-of-date now) that generates the error messages that you see is a failure to create /etc/.pwd.lock, almost certainly because your process doesn't have write permissions to /etc.That's why it's failing.  Unfortunately, I don't have the time to research whether it should fail or not.