I was adding a new user to my RedHat 9 box for a specialsed company program and ran the Newusers command against the passwd on accident and cannot login at all, anywhere as anyone. This is a critical system that is denying all login requests now and I need to get it back up and running ASAP. If anyone has seen this type of behaviour before and knows how to fic it please let me know what I need to do. I am not exactly a total newbie when it comes to using *nix, but I am still learning a lot as well. Any help will be greatly appreciated.


Schlzm

I have attempted using several possible different passwords for root that may have been used reviously with no luck. I don't want to reboot the server for fear of permenantly enforcing what changed in the system. I really need to know if I can at least get a login to perform a restore of the system if possible, perhaps a recovery console or restore mode at a shell? If anyone has anything at all throw it out here I am grasping at straws at this point.


Schlzm

I am trying to mount the system drive using a livecd version of slackware, slax 5.06, and am running into problems. It seems that slax doesn't want to recognize the harddrive, an dI know that if I could get into the drive I could reset the password for root and get back into the system. Anyone have any ideas on this? Or am I just wasting my time here?


Schlzm

Problems like this usually require booting up in single user mode. Last time I used RH (long time ago) it was as simple as typing Linux single from Lilo boot prompt.

That was a no go, looks like I am going to have to perform an install over the top. Is this possible in Linux without losing data? All I really need to do is reset the Root PW.


Schlzm

I actually never said it will work the same. Now you know you have to boot in single user mode, look it up in your RH documentation, search Google and LQ, find the correct procedure for your box. I can do it for you, but hey - it is your box.

Issue resolved. I was able to boot into rescue mode from installation disk 1 and chroot the original file system. After that resetting the passwords and restoring a good group of file from backup took care of the problem. Thanks for the suggestions Emerson, they got me moving in the right direction.


Schlzm