Hello.

I am running Linux Red Hat 9.0 on one of my machines. I am new to Linux in a way but I love it! The other day I installed it on a bigger hard drive and played and around and I believe I have messed something up because two days later when I tried to login it told me that the administrator had locked my account because my password has expired when I AM the admin.

Someone told me over at xmbforums.com (awesome forum software) to hit CTRL - ALT - F1 and type in root as the login and then type in some code that would reset my pass to whatever but when I get to the password field I cannot type anything in.

I have tried a lot of different things but none have worked I even re-installed lLinux but I didn't reformat so I still had the same things.

If anyone has a solution please reply.

Thanks,
MannaPC Webmaster

BTW where did you get <= that icon? I can I use it on my site?

You can go to a console, ctrl alt F1, and login then type passwd. That will let you change the password to something else. There is a config file somewhere that you can change so that it won't expire. I can't recall which one it is though.

If you can not login, because you have expired, you may have to boot in single user mode. If you use grub, it is pretty easy. Reboot, when grub comes up, highlight the Linux boot like you are going to boot Linux and hit e twice. Add single to the end of the line. Note, there is no network or anything here. This is a bare, really bare, boot up. Not much of anything works when you boot this way. You will not have to login though. You go straight to a text prompt, no GUI either.

When you get to that prompt, type in passwd, then enter your new password twice. If you get no errors, type in reboot. You may want to type in init 5. That should be the same as a regular boot.

You may have a boot line called failsafe. You may can boot to that and this work as well. Not real sure, depends on how Redhat set it up to boot.

On the penguin with the ? mark. You need to talk to Jeremy about that. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ssage&userid=1

Jeremy's a OK guy but if he made it, he may want to keep it. Not real sure. Sort of depends on where he got. You may try a www.google.com/image and see if it is public or copyrighted. If it is copyrighted, don't use it. There are people that look for those things ya know. Not worth getting in trouble over.

Hope that helps. If you use lilo, sorry. I don't know how to fix. There likely is a way, I'm just a grub user is all.

Later

If you do have lilo you can bootup with this command...

linux init=/bin/sh


If your kernel name is listed other than linux replace linux with that like so...

"Red Hat Linux (2.4.20-31.9)" init=/bin/sh




Then change the password like this....


passwd


Hopefully this will fix it, however there is a problem because the root password should not expire.

Thanks I will go try that!

That is what I was thinking too. I was not aware that root password would expire, at least by default. I did see a config file somewhere once that would but didn't understand why you would want it.

Hope one of those helps.