After opening my laptop today, the first thing was of course to login to various systems, as I usually do. But this time I couldn't and instead was greeted with:

  $ ssh foobar
  You don't exist, go away!

At first I thought the remote system was at fault, but ssh would print the same message for every other system I was trying to login to. This had been reported by others already and after just clicking those links I tried again and this time ssh was able to login w/o a problem. So, while this was only a temporary issue, let's recap and dig into that once again.

Apparently, the error message is generated by the client:

$ strings `which ssh` | grep away
You don't exist, go away!

It's right there in ssh.c:

pw = getpwuid(original_real_uid);
	if (!pw) {
		logit("You don't exist, go away!");
		exit(255);
	}

So, the call to getpwuid() failed. Now, why would it do that? In the manpage it says:

   These functions obtain information from DirectoryService(8),
   including records in /etc/passwd

And /etc/passwd was there all the time (hah!), so maybe DirectoryService(8) screwed up? Let's see if we find something in /var/log/system.log:

14:59:57 coreservicesd[54]: _scserver_ServerCheckin: client uid validation failure; getpwuid(502) == NULL
14:59:58 loginwindow[376]: resume called when there was already a timer
14:59:58 coreservicesd[54]: _scserver_ServerCheckin: client uid validation failure; getpwuid(502) == NULL

There it is. Now, restarting coreservicesd (or securityd) would have helped, but by now the system was fully waken up from sleep and getpwuid() was able to do what it does - and ssh was working again, too. If it happens again and won't recover by itself - we know what to do :-)