Thanks to Pat, Mario, Jim, Bac and IvanHoe for their responses.
Suggestions were to go to single user mode to change the password, boot
with the cd and change the password, try to su from another account that
has system privileges, restore passwd file.
I should have put in more details about the problem but here is what happened.
I changed my account password on a 4.0D system. After changing it, I was
prompted to run the mkpasswd /etc/passwd command which I did.
The next morning when I tried to log in it wouldn't let me, I thought I
must have typed my new password wrong when I set it up the day before. I'll
just go log in as root at the console and change it later on.
So I go to the console try log in as root and it won't let me. Ouch !
So I get the password of the other person who has system privileges and log
in and it works but I can't su to root.
I take a look at the passwd file, root is there but my account is gone, I
also notice two old accounts that I had removed some time ago that are back
and another account that I know should be there is gone. Maybe and old
passwd file has somehow been restored ? No because there are also recent
accounts in the passwd file. What the ...
So I look at the date of my passwd file and its from beginning of December,
hmm that's wrong, the date of passwd.dir and passwd.pag are Jan 29 the day
I changed my password and ran the mkpasswd command.
Anyway since some old accounts are back I track the previous system admin
of the box and ask him if he remembers the password from back then. I try
the old root password and I'm in.
I also restored the passwd file (in a different directory) from the day
before I changed my password. And that passwd file was also wrong i.e. my
account information wasn't there.
So today I will be digging into passwd, passwd.dir and passwd.pag. I'll try
to find what could have happen and how exactly those files affect each other.
So to resume, don't blindly do what the systems tells you to do ( I knew
that but I guess I was running in dumb mode that day).
Francis
Received on Wed Jan 31 2001 - 13:53:27 NZDT