Re: Automatic root login after boot
On Thu, 9 Oct 1997, Alastair Gregory wrote:
> I have an odd problem with my Debian system. When
> it boots up into multi-user mode, it "automatically" logs in
> as 'root' on the first console. It's impossible to terminate
> the session, as a new one starts immediately after I exit
> the shell. It's in run level 2 and the other consoles behave
> normally.
Look at the line beginning 1: in /etc/inittab.
> Another problem I have is that the machine won't reboot
> by itself. If I "telinit 6", it shuts down, then sits there
> without rebooting until I hit the reset button. Is this an
> AMD quirk?
I had a Cyrix machine that would sometimes do this (and on power-on, it
would just sit there without POSTing).
> I loaded Debian 1.3 on an old AMD 486-80 based
> machine. It seemed to load properly, except that a
> number of utilities were not present (such as 'dselect',
> "mesg", "start-stop-daemon"). I was a bit dubious, but
> not having loaded Debian for a while (last time it was
> at 1.0, I think) I just assumed I wasn't up with the
> latest developments. I scrounged a dselect binary which
> ran, but no access methods were available so I was
> no better off.
>
> The autologin phenomenon didn't manifest itself until I
> tried reinstalling the base system from the boot diskettes.
> On booting from the hard disk after this, it asked me to
> pick a root password, but after the "passwd" dialog,
> it'd say "Try again" and run "passwd" again. I flipped to
> another console, logged in as a mere user, su'ed and killed
> the passwd and bash processes, and ran "passwd" manually
> to set the root password. Now I have the autologin problem
> but "dselect" seems to be OK.
>
> My guess is that part(s) of the Debian load process didn't
> complete, or failed silently. Can anyone shed light on this?
> Could I somehow have bad install disks and not know it?
Deian shuffles inittab.real (if I remember the filename correctly) and
inittab when it completes correctly. It was months ago, and I had had
to reboot while in that first session after setting the root password,
so the shuffling didn't get done.
Once I fixed my problem (I think it was when perl had problems, maybe a
bad link) and edited inittab, the system was fine.
--
David Wright, Open University, Earth Science Department, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
U.K. email: d.wright@open.ac.uk tel: +44 1908 653 739 fax: +44 1908 655 151
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