Hi Alex, I see what you are saying, but I think our situations are slightly different. The line self.__user_system_pwent = pwd.getpwnam(job.user.email.split('@')[0] ) *does* return the correct username, however, that user is not present in the Virtual machine that is running Galaxy, so when the job runner calls for pwd.getpwuid(), there is nothing there. By the way, the VM uses key authentication only, not passwords. The problem I think I'm having is that the /etc/passwd file I want to use is located on the cluster, not on the virtual machine. I'm not sure if I can just copy that file over. How else can I get ahold of the uid of the user who cannot log in to the machine Galaxy is running on? Thanks for the help, Carrie Ganote __________________________________________________________________________________ Hi Carrie, I run a crontab job every 5 minutes that repopulates the galaxy database with the real user names we use instead of the email style user names by updating the galaxy_user.username column. Then, I patch jobs/__init__.py as follows: # self.__user_system_pwent = pwd.getpwnam( job.user.email.split('@')[0] ) self.__user_system_pwent = pwd.getpwnam( job.user.username ) Regards, Alex