I've got a PXE server set up, the clients boot, and all seems to be OK.

I get to the point of "Running /sbin/init", and it dies.

I change the inittab to run in runlevel 1, and I get a bash prompt. If I try to change the root password with passwd, I either get "Authentication token manipulation error" or "Authentication token lock busy".

This is booting from NFS so almost everything is read-only.

I've had this fixed once before, but I had to change a few things and make a new image on the server, and lost the changes I made. Like a dummy I didn't back it up, nor bookmark the page that had the fix.

I remember commenting out a file in the /etc/pam.d/ directory, and everything worked fine afterward...

Can anyone provide a clue what it may have been?


Thanks SO much in advance!

Please folks... This is URGENT!

This is for work and it's very important to get running SOON!

^bump^

Anyone?

Another bump

No one is even trying to guess?

Thanks for nothing!

Try to edit /etc/shadow to remove root password. Root password is coded on the line:
root:xxxxxxxxxxx:something-else.
If you remove 'xxxxxxx' between first and second colons it will remove root password. Be careful, verify what you are doing.

Does this help?

http://www.redhat.com/archives/pam-l.../msg00030.html

If not, also try posting to justlinux.com, they seem a bit more knowledgeable, but make sure to post the same descriptive subject header, as they are also a bit more anal than this forum.