Hello Guys,

I have a Ubuntu Fiesty Linux which displays the following at the time I supply the following commands:

I tried logging through runlevel 1 but all it ends saying:

Its just displaying cursor and nothing ahead.


I could see
#root .. .. ..

Entry on /etc/passwd but couldnt modify.

Pls Help !!!

Have you tried as your admin user (ie not root)

sudo passwd -u root

to set the password?

vjs@micex:~$ sudo passwd -u root
sudo: no passwd entry for root!
vjs@micex:~$

vjs@micex:~$ sudo passwd -u admin
sudo: no passwd entry for root!
vjs@micex:~$

Still not working!!

Why does the second entry give the same message as the first? What user are you doing this as?

You could boot it into single user mode and set a password. (Press the esc key immediately after the powerup test and then select recovery mode.) But you shouldn't need a root password to use sudo! In fact, Ubuntu is designed to not have a root password. (This has been a cause for contention with some people.) So I would wonder if the cause of it wanting a root password to be set shouldn't be investigated.

May be it is trying to say that the passwd file itself does not have any entry for root?
I use Ubuntu and never need to give root password for sudo and hence logically it should not matter.
But try editing the file if you can but if you can not sudo then you should not be able to edit the file either.
Only way is to enter single user mode or recovery mode.

I followed http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/recove...word-file.html
and ran :

1. Rebooted
2. Edit Recovery Mode : with init=/bin/bash
3. mount -rw -o remount /
4. Edited /etc/passwd file(Surprisingly nano editor was working but vi dint)
5. Moved passwd- to passwd and moved shadow- to shadow.
6. Forcibly rebooted.

Now it seems to work. But it displays:

I have no name!@micex:~$


Why it is displaying so??

Bingo! I think I (and perhaps others) read the error message a little too quickly.

Does anybody else think this is all too strange? If this is a new installation I wonder if it should be re-installed. If it is not new, I am wondering if the system has been compromised. Reactions from anybody else?

@ajeetraina,

You might want to wait just a little while to see if anybody else has an opinion on this.

EDIT: Before your last repair attempt, did you do anything that might have deleted the root account? I just checked UbuntuForums and found an entry where somebody got this error after deleting the root account (as linuxlover.chaitanya suggested). But accounts shouldn't just magically disappear!

Reference: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-3575.html

I went on Google with the terms 'Ubuntu "I have no name!"'. There are a large number of posts and they seem to be caused after many different changes but a common theme is that the permissions of one file or another doesn't allow reading. At first glance the "I have no name!" looked suspicious as well but apparently it isn't evidence of being compromised.

You may want to check your logs and see what errors are noted there. Also check the permissions of your /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/group & /etc/hosts.

I just checked an edgy eft installation:

Note that the "dash files" which you moved over have different ownership/permissions than the "non-dash files." If fiesty uses the same scheme then you would need to:

Then double check with

In particular, make sure you do not make /etc/shadow world readable.

BTW, on edgy, making /etc/passwd not world readable does, in fact, produce the symptom you quoted.

Whats :
Shadown????

ANyway..When I ran rest of commands besides the above chown its running fine.
Thanks Prof.

Oops! Must have had a twitching finger or something. I've corrected it in the post. Thanks.

He owns shadows. What a Linux beast.

Carl Jung tought us that a long time ago! </OT>