Re: can't mount or su
On Tue, Dec 17, 2002 at 01:29:21PM -0500, Vikki Roemer wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 17, 2002 at 06:30:03AM +0000, Pigeon wrote:
> >
> > This su problem happened to me, with the additional weirdness that if
> > I just hit return when su prompted for a password - ie. gave it NO
> > password - it would su me to root!
>
> Nope, I don't have that.
>
> >
> > Some helpful person on the list whose name I have unfortunately
> > forgotten suggested that I check for corrupted /etc/passwd and
> > /etc/shadow, and that was it sorted.
>
> Sorted? What do you mean?
Sorted - sorted out, fixed, OK, working, back up, back in action
> But the files don't look corrupted.
It may be subtle. My situation may not be the same as yours; the file
had got corrupted when I nuked my system mucking about with shared
libraries, and I didn't have shadow passwords turned on. /etc/shadow
looked OK to a casual inspection, but in fact it had a different root
password from /etc/passwd. Not having shadow passwords, I simply
copied /etc/passwd to /etc/shadow and that fixed [sorted :-)] it.
Later on, I had some other more minor password-related problem (can't
remember what, it was too minor) which I fixed by deleting /etc/shadow
entirely and replacing it with a file of zero length.
> Though I do want to get rid of some of the entries since I don't need
> them anymore (they're from programs that I uninstalled long ago).
> Can I edit the file by hand, or will that screw it up? I don't think
> I can use linuxconf to get rid of them since they're not showing up in
> that program (especially the qmail entries-- there are 6 qmail
> entries, but linuxconf is only displaying 1, and yet I don't ever
> remember having qmail installed in the first place!). I was just
> wondering since some config files cannot be edited by hand or there
> will be Dire Consequences.
AFAIK if nothing is using those user/group IDs you can delete the
relevant lines and you'll be OK. Make sure you backup the original
versions though just in case.
Pigeon
Reply to: