Password won't reset with Mdk 10.1
 

I'm operating on a Dell GX-150, Mdk 10.1. I've searched through 8 pages of posts but haven't found anything that helps. I have four accounts set up on my computer. Three of the accounts, including Root, work just fine. However, trying to log in to my account, and my password is not accepted. I have no idea why my pw doesn't work - I haven't installed any updates, I've been trying to optimize my screen resolution, but that's it. So I go to MCC under my root account and take a look at my account. The first thing that I notice is that my pw is now five stars long instead of four '*****' - do idea why. Regardless, I change the pw, enter it twice, logout, try login - it appears to be accepted, but then I end up back at the gui login.
Next, I log in as root, to to MCC, users, change my pw again, but this time I just go back to my User information, and my pw is back to being five characters long. Then I make it nine characters long, click OK, go back to Edit Groups / Users - but again, the pw reverts to five characters. HELP.

First of all: many gui tools for usermanagement allways display the sam eamount of "*" for each password.
That way noone looking over your shoulder can see how long a password is supposed to be.

What you described as a allmost succesfull login (after changing the password) but then being directed bacj to the login screen, point to something like permisssion problems on your homedir... However that could have hapened.

PLease check if you have enough free space on /home and /tmp remember that root _allways_ has more free space thenb users, so that no user can fillup the entire filesystem)

Then check from a console (CRTL-F1) if you can login correctly, and check for errors.
If you can login here, you have no password problems.

Please check if you home dir is setup correctly in /ets/passwd

Go to /etc/passwd instead of your gui tools.
If there 's an "x" (no quotes) in your files, next to your name,
the encrypted passwd is in another file called /etc/shadow.
QUOTE :
"The command /usr/sbin/pwunconv deactivates the shadow password management and
generates a new file for /etc/passwd from
the files /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow. This diminishes your system security."

Excerpt from "Running Linux" fourth edition , O'Reilly editions. I don't know
if this works but this could help you get your former passwd back. Use it
at your own risks, however.

cheers

Permission denied
 

"Go to /etc/passwd instead of your gui tools."

I tried this in both a terminal and the console under MCC (is there a dufference between the two?) but both times I received an error message of : bash: /etc/passwd: Permission denied

I am currently logged in as root, and in terminal and console mode I took the further step of logging in as 'super user (does this make a difference once you are already in as root?)

I also tried /etc/shadow under the same circumstances, and I received the same message of permission denied.

"PLease check if you have enough free space on /home and /tmp remember that root _allways_ has more free space thenb users, so that no user can fillup the entire filesystem)"

How do I do this? But I don't think this is a problem - I just freed up gigis of space this week, before the lock-out.

"Then check from a console (CRTL-F1) if you can login correctly, and check for errors. If you can login here, you have no password problems."

I tried this as well, but nothing came up for me to login to.

I'll keep trying whatever it is you ask of me next. Thanks for your help

Oh yes, I see. You must open the /etc/passwd file with a text editor.

Type in a console, as root : vim /etc/passwd.

It will enable you to see what's inside your file.
Verify if you have the "x" character at the beginning
of your file, where there should be your password (encrypted, of course).
If you don't have vim on your system, just go to your main menu and open
the file with KWrite or Kate or another text editor.
Normally you shouldn't need to be logged in as root. But it is not a bad thing
if you use KWrite or Kate. To modify the lines in a file, you need to become
root ('su' + password) in a console

Do that and post the result
cheers

PS to check how much memory a directory occupies :

du /home du /tmp they will show you the space occupied by the home and temporary
directories. du stands for disk usage

Type in a console, as root : vim /etc/passwd.

It will enable you to see what's inside your file.
Verify if you have the "x" character at the beginning
of your file, where there should be your password (encrypted, of course).

OK, soI did that and this is what I got: myname:x:501:501:Myname:/home/myname:/bin/bash


PS to check how much memory a directory occupies :

du /home du /tmp they will show you the space occupied by the home and temporary
directories. du stands for disk usage

I checked the directories: 13G under Home and 2.3M under temp

What is the next step?

[QUOTE]Originally posted by samael26
[B]Go to /etc/passwd instead of your gui tools.
If there 's an "x" (no quotes) in your files, next to your name,
the encrypted passwd is in another file called /etc/shadow.
QUOTE :
"The command /usr/sbin/pwunconv deactivates the shadow password management and
generates a new file for /etc/passwd from
the files /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow. This diminishes your system security."

Hey, I missed this /etc/shadow the first time through, so I went back and checked that file and this is what I found:

myname:$1$q.A29GW5$6ee./LS7iERP6fUdxBwBD1:12942:-1:99999:-1:::

Does this help at all?


:confused: Still Lost :confused:

Are you _sure_ that you don't use any funnny characters in _your_ password wihich you don't use in the other 3 passwords.

If you can login and change the passwords on the other accounts, there is nothing wrong in /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow.
Don't go poking around in these files, unless you are absolutly sure what you are doing.
There are commandline tools to do this.

Please, go to a console (STRG-F1), then try the following:

- login as root
- logout
- login as a user which is known to work
- logout
- login as the "broken" user
- logout
- login as the "broken" user
- type "passwd"
- it will prompt for the current password, and a new password (twice)
- after succesfull change: logout
- login as "broken" user with new password
- logout


All these steps _must_ be done at console level (or ssh from xterm if you must, but I'd rather not do it, the problem is hard enough to debug as it is)

Please post at wihch step you get stuck, and why (don't post the passwords though :-)

[QUOTE]Originally posted by huibert.alblas
[B]Are you _sure_ that you don't use any funnny characters in _your_ password wihich you don't use in the other 3 passwords.

If you can login and change the passwords on the other accounts, there is nothing wrong in /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow.
Don't go poking around in these files, unless you are absolutly sure what you are doing.
There are commandline tools to do this.

Please, go to a console (STRG-F1), then try the following:

- login as root
- logout
- login as a user which is known to work
- logout
- login as the "broken" user
- logout
- login as the "broken" user
- type "passwd"
- it will prompt for the current password, and a new password (twice)
- after succesfull change: logout
- login as "broken" user with new password
- logout


Ok, so I did as you said, and this is what happened:

After going in as root, a user that works, and then the broken user, I received this message (aftering logging in with broken user):

No directory /home/myname!
Logging in with home = "/"
-bash: /home/myname/.bash-profile:Permission denied

I still went ahead with passwd, changed it and then received:

passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully

Then I tried my gui login with the broken account: no luck. It just went through the same routine, appears to be loading, but then goes back to the gui login screen. Of note, my "guest" account is now exhibiting the same behaviour.

:confused:

Looks to me as if your /home partition is full, and your broken user account does not have a directory. To check if the /home partition is full, you can open KDiskFree in KDE at System / Monitoring / KDiskFree in the Mandrake menu system. This tool will show you how much free space you have on each mounted partition as well as the partition size and the amount of space used. If the /home partition is full, you may have to re-size it using a tool such as PartitionMagic or bootlt. Both have the ability to re-size partitions nondestructively.

HTH,

Thanks for chipping in here Ernie, much appreciated. I checked with KDiskFree as you suggested. Here are the results:

/dev/hda1 ext 3 is 64% full
/dev/hda6 ext 2 is 14.3% full

That doesn't seem like they are full.

:confused:

Disk full is not the problem here,
but could have been, so thanks for the chip-in :-)

Now back on topic, you are almost there.
After going through my proposed laundry list you gave the correct information to remedy your problem.

you wrote:
The "broken" user (lets call him "myname") has no home directory (poor guy)
It looks like you created this user, but the directory was not created.
But it is easy to recover:

In almost all linux distris I know there is a directory "/etc/skell"
now as root do the following:

Innormal language:
Create the users home directory,
copy the default files into this diretory,
Change permisions for the useres directory to the user
(you coud alos do "chmod -R myname.users" if myname is in th euser group.

That's it.
That fact that you cannot use a grphical login is because X needs to set ~/.Xauthority but could not because your home directoyr was not writable for you......
Doing a simple text-console login does work, allthough your bash setting are not safed and you will have no bash_history.


Hope this is the end of your search:

Hapy Hacking!

In almost all linux distris I know there is a directory "/etc/skell"
now as root do the following:


I did as you said for the first few steps and this is what happened:

[root@localhost root]# cd /home
[root@localhost home]# mkdir myname
mkdir: cannot create directory `myname': File exists
[root@localhost home]# cd /etc/skell
bash: cd: /etc/skell: No such file or directory


I figured I would keep going even after 'cannot create directory' just to see what happens; but then stopped at 'No such file or directory.' I also know that I can go into /home/myname to retrieve files by being root - doesn't that also counter the "No directory" hypothesis?

Still confused, but greatly appreciative of all these efforts.


:Pengy:

No such file or directory: means "/etc/skel" does not exists.
This is not a problem...

"Cannot create directory" on "/home/myname" means that the directory is already there.
You can retrieve files by being root.
You should have done the next steps anyway, that way the filepermissions would be ok again :-)

please post what happens with
Don't have much time now, just follw the recipe.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by huibert.alblas
[B]No such file or directory: means "/etc/skel" does not exists.
This is not a problem...

"Cannot create directory" on "/home/myname" means that the directory is already there.
You can retrieve files by being root.
You should have done the next steps anyway, that way the filepermissions would be ok again :-)

please post what happens with
Ok, so before I follow your recipe the rest of the way, here is what happened out of ls -lah /home:

total 32K
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4.0K Jun 6 23:52 ./
drwxr-xr-x 19 root adm 4.0K Jun 8 19:19 ../
drwx--x--x 23 guest guest 4.0K Jun 6 11:09 guest/
drwx--x--x 2 root root 4.0K Mar 18 13:38 lost+found/
d--------T 51 guest guest 8.0K Jun 8 14:35 myname/
drwx--x--x 30 mary mary 4.0K Jun 10 14:30 mary/
drwx------ 2 root root 4.0K Jun 9 03:02 .Trash-root/
]

Ok, so after I did the above, I then went and followed your recipe again:

[
[root@localhost home]# mk dir myname
bash: mk: command not found
[root@localhost home]# mkdir myname
mkdir: cannot create directory `myname': File exists
[root@localhost home]# cd /etc/skell
bash: cd: /etc/skell: No such file or directory
[root@localhost home]# copy -R * .* /home/myname/.
bash: copy: command not found
[root@localhost home]# copy -R * .*/home/myname/.
bash: copy: command not found
[root@localhost home]# copy -R *.*/home/phillip/.
bash: copy: command not found
[root@localhost home]# cd /home
[root@localhost home]# chown -R myname myname
[root@localhost home]#
root@localhost home]# ls -lah /home
total 32K
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4.0K Jun 6 23:52 ./
drwxr-xr-x 19 root adm 4.0K Jun 8 19:19 ../
drwx--x--x 23 guest guest 4.0K Jun 6 11:09 guest/
drwx--x--x 2 root root 4.0K Mar 18 13:38 lost+found/
d--------T 51 myname guest 8.0K Jun 8 14:35 myname/
drwx--x--x 30 mary mary 4.0K Jun 10 14:30 mary/
drwx------ 2 root root 4.0K Jun 9 03:02 .Trash-root/

The several copy -R lines were me just trying different permutations of what you had wriiten, trying to see if I had made a mistake in following the code.

I'll take this time to remind you that the "guest" account has been acting in the same manner recently as well.

Big Thank-You.

Sorry about the "copy" command,
That was my quicktyping, copy under linux is called "cp"
BTW: you should learn how to read error messages.
The code above showed the following:
BASH: ( = "heelo I'm bash, your linux command shell " )
COPY: ( = "about this copy command you gave me" )
COMMAND NOT FOUND ( = " I cannot do this COPY thing, I don't know what it is, maybe you mistyped it ,or something else is wrong. trying to issue COPY again willnot help, because I don't know what COPY is " )

Anyway, the situation is very funny, you have the wrong file permissions on the /home/myname directory.

as root do
the "find -type d | while read DIR ; do " command is a loop,
it finds all "files" of the type DIRECTORY ( so it finds all directories, but in UNIXes everything is a file, it is a philosophy thing, just like in WIN32 : "everything is an OBJECT" ), then for each found FILE (which is stored in the variable DIR, we change the permissions to allow searching (executing) the directory.
This should put some correct permisssions on all files , and directories in your home dir.

Big question is:
How did things get screwed up like this?

Did you copy you home directory to cd and back, or from to FAT32, or any thing like it?

Permissions like:
are not set easily :-)

I hope htis gets you going.

as root do
the "find -type d | while read DIR ; do " command is a loop,
it finds all "files" of the type DIRECTORY ( so it finds all directories, but in UNIXes everything is a file, it is a philosophy thing, just like in WIN32 : "everything is an OBJECT" ), then for each found FILE (which is stored in the variable DIR, we change the permissions to allow searching (executing) the directory.
This should put some correct permisssions on all files , and directories in your home dir.

Big question is:
How did things get screwed up like this?

Did you copy you home directory to cd and back, or from to FAT32, or any thing like it?

Nope, I didn't do anything along these lines.
Ok, so I now have my guest account back - I'm not sure why, but I'm that closer to happy. As for my account, well, that is a different story, I still cannot get access to it. I went back to the cp command from an earlier post, and this is what happened:

[root@localhost root]# cd /home
[root@localhost home]# mkdir myname
mkdir: cannot create directory `myname': File exists
[root@localhost home]# cd etc/skell
bash: cd: etc/skell: No such file or directory
[root@localhost home]# cp -R * .* /home/myname
cp: cannot copy a directory, `myname', into itself, `/home/myname/myname'
cp: cannot copy a directory, `myname', into itself, `/home/myname/myname'
cp: cannot copy a directory, `myname', into itself, `/home/myname/myname'

That didn't seem to go very well, so then I checked the file permissions again:

[root@localhost root]# ls -lah /home
total 32K
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4.0K Jun 6 23:52 ./
drwxr-xr-x 19 root adm 4.0K Jun 8 19:19 ../
drwx--x--x 23 guest guest 4.0K Jun 6 11:09 guest/
drwx--x--x 2 root root 4.0K Mar 18 13:38 lost+found/
d--------T 54 guest guest 8.0K Jun 12 01:38 myname/
drwx--x--x 30 mary mary 4.0K Jun 11 09:15 mary/
drwx------ 2 root root 4.0K Jun 9 03:02 .Trash-root/
[root@localhost root]#

These are all the same as my last post. Then I did what you told me to above:

[root@localhost root]# cd /home
[root@localhost home]# chmod -R u+rw myname
[root@localhost home]# cd myname
[root@localhost myname]# find -type d | while read DIR ; do
> chmod u+x "$DIR"
> done
[root@localhost myname]#

Then I checked the file permissions again:

[root@localhost myname]# ls -lah /home
total 32K
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4.0K Jun 6 23:52 ./
drwxr-xr-x 19 root adm 4.0K Jun 8 19:19 ../
drwx--x--x 23 guest guest 4.0K Jun 12 01:54 guest/
drwx--x--x 2 root root 4.0K Mar 18 13:38 lost+found/
drwx-----T 54 guest guest 8.0K Jun 12 01:38 myname/
drwx--x--x 30 mary mary 4.0K Jun 11 09:15 mary/
drwx------ 2 root root 4.0K Jun 9 03:02 .Trash-root/
[root@localhost myname]#

I see that some permissions have changed: drwx-----T 54 guest guest 8.0K Jun 12 01:38 myname/

However, I am still unable to access my account without resorting to root. I greatly appreciate that you have explained most of what you have asked me to do, and now I have another question for you. I don't understand why two of these are the same, but the third is not:

drwx--x--x 23 guest guest 4.0K Jun 12 01:54 guest/
drwx--x--x 30 mary mary 4.0K Jun 11 09:15 mary/
drwx-----T 54 guest guest 8.0K Jun 12 01:38 myname/

Shouldn't it be myname myname 8.0K Jun 12 01:38 myname - the same format as the "working" accounts? And what is that "T" mean?! On a related note, what is lost+found and its relation to root?

Finally, I just want to say that I bought an introductory book to linux tonight - hopefully I won't be a newbie to linux forever. I'm sure I'm asking you some very basic questions.


:confused: :Pengy: :confused:

You are right, myname, should be owned by myname.
The directory "myname" is (somehow again) owned by "guest", do (as root):


The last chmod command removes the T permission (the sticky bit :-) really, it is called that way, if you want to know more, google for it, but it should not bother you yet)

This should do the trick

Don't bother to copy /etc/skell, this is only needed when you have no HomeDirectory for the user yet.

The "lost+found" directory is located on the root directory of every mounted partition.
If you screw up the filesystem, and do a filsystem check, all files that cannot be properly restored land here.
Because the system does not know whose files they were, these are all owned by root now. This is a security thing. The directory should be empty anyway, unless you are in dire straits allready.

Buying a lnux book is "a very good thing to do" (tm)
I allways advice anybody who is new to linux to _buy_ Suse or mandrake, because of the crapload of documentation you get with them, very important and very basic stuff.
(Well, they used to be good, but I have last seen a SUSE box, about Suse 5 and Redhat 6 times, that's a few years ago.)

If you know your way around after reading the book, you can get your hands dirty and install Debian (plain sarge, not ubuntu or something like it) or gentoo.
That's were the real fun starts.

But as allways in live: big things always start out as simple litle things, givven enough time to grow.

Happy Hacking!

[QUOTE]Originally posted by huibert.alblas
[B]You are right, myname, should be owned by myname.
The directory "myname" is (somehow again) owned by "guest", do (as root):


The last chmod command removes the T permission (the sticky bit :-) really, it is called that way, if you want to know more, google for it, but it should not bother you yet)

This should do the trick

Ugh. I feel as if we are getting closer - but not there yet. I did as you said above, but I still cannot gain a successful login. Here are the latest permissions, and I seem to be missing some from the other accounts:

[root@localhost root]# ls -lah /home
total 32K
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4.0K Jun 6 23:52 ./
drwxr-xr-x 19 root adm 4.0K Jun 12 18:25 ../
drwx--x--x 23 guest guest 4.0K Jun 12 01:54 guest/
drwx--x--x 2 root root 4.0K Mar 18 13:38 lost+found/
d--------T 56 guest guest 8.0K Jun 13 11:50 myname/
drwx--x--x 30 mary mary 4.0K Jun 11 09:15 mary/
drwx------ 2 root root 4.0K Jun 9 03:02 .Trash-root/
[root@localhost root]#

Now that's funny. When last I checked, the permissions were different, showing myname myname where it should, but now it says guest guest. I'm going to run through you instructions above, again:

[root@localhost root]# cd /home
[root@localhost home]# chown -R myname.myname myname
[root@localhost home]# chmod -R -t myname
[root@localhost home]# ls -lah /home
total 32K
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4.0K Jun 6 23:52 ./
drwxr-xr-x 19 root adm 4.0K Jun 12 18:25 ../
drwx--x--x 23 guest guest 4.0K Jun 12 01:54 guest/
drwx--x--x 2 root root 4.0K Mar 18 13:38 lost+found/
d--------- 56 myname myname 8.0K Jun 13 11:50 myname/
drwx--x--x 30 mary mary 4.0K Jun 11 09:15 mary/
drwx------ 2 root root 4.0K Jun 9 03:02 .Trash-root/
[root@localhost home]#

Ok, so now I'm going to logout of root, go back to the gui login and try to login as myname. I'll edit this post in a few minutes. I do believe I'm correct in assuming that when I come back to ls -lah/home in a few minutes, nothing should have changed.

I'm back (having logged out and shutdown). I checked the permissions and all is as it should be. However, I still cannot login as myname. I use Gnome as my desktop, so I've been trying to login as Gnome each time - without success. This last time I tried KDE under myname and here are the error messages I received:

Error message 1:

No write access to $Home directory (1)
KDE is unable to start

Error message 2:

There was a system error setting up inter-process communications for KDE. The message returned by the system was:
could not rerad network connection list.
//. DCOPserver_localhost_0
Please check that the "dcopserver" program is running.

Error message 3:

will not save configuration
configuration file "//.kde/share/config/Ksplashrc not writeable
configuration file "//.kde/share/config/Kdeglobal not writeable

Error message 4:

No write access to $Home directory (1)
KDE is unable to start


I hope these are clues that help.

:cry: (close but not yet)

EDIT (shortly after my post, I saw my errors!!) :
Damn!!!

I gave you the wrong script.
Tis would should set the xorrect permissions:
You can read on for the old message, just ignore the ranting, please.

The old messege:


I don't know what keeps resetting the filepermissions on your system, because the permissions were correct at sometime in the past (I could see from your posts) and now they are borked again.

To setup propper permissiosn on your home dir repeat these steps (as root):

Unless you are constantly fiddling around whithout really knowing what you are doing (which would be perfectly normal in your situation) there must be some programm/background task setting directories to the wrong permissions.

You need to look closer to the infromation givven to you by me, and the system.

As you have listed you /home/ dir

this:
shows, that you will not be able to login to the gui, because you cannot write to you own home directory.
Until this is not solved, trying to use X is futile.

This whole discussion ran around 2 things:
- /home/myname was not owned by myname
- /home/myname had totaly wrong file permissions

This should have been easy to fix, had you just done what I told you.
By "just done" I mean, reading, executing and than reading again, and trying to understand waht happened and why....

I know I'm ranting a bit, but this could have been solved in 2 posts,
And i just hate it when stuff doesn't work the way it is supposed to be :-), so I will keep on posting here, until you can login into your computer...
I need some smileys here, but I don't know how to insert them,
could you explain where you get the blinking smileys?

To make a long story short.
"Set the right permissions, and your ready to go."

Happy Hacking!

FINALLY!!!
 

[NOTICE: message below this one]


Hey Huibert!
All seems to be working well now! I've posted my final commands below, mostly so that others may be able to see the final solution of all this trouble. I'm not convinced that there is something somewhere resetting my permissions, but I have just finished a series of logins logouts and shutdowns and all seems to be holding.
Oh, and for whatever reason, I am now able to boot Mozilla. The other users were always able to boot it up, but I wasn't able to do so.

Thank-YOU!

:D :D :D :D

[root@localhost root]# ls -lah /home
total 32K
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4.0K Jun 6 23:52 ./
drwxr-xr-x 19 root adm 4.0K Jun 21 09:16 ../
drwx--x--x 23 guest guest 4.0K Jun 14 19:53 guest/
drwx--x--x 2 root root 4.0K Mar 18 13:38 lost+found/
d--------T 56 guest guest 8.0K Jun 14 20:08 myname/
drwx--x--x 30 mary mary 4.0K Jun 20 19:37 mary/
drwx------ 2 root root 4.0K Jun 15 18:50 .Trash-root/

[root@localhost root]# cd /home
[root@localhost home]# chmod -R u+rw myname
[root@localhost home]# cd myname
[root@localhost myname]# find -type d | while read DIR ; do chmod u+rwx "$DIR" ; done
[root@localhost myname]# ls -lah /home total 32K
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4.0K Jun 6 23:52 ./
drwxr-xr-x 19 root adm 4.0K Jun 21 09:16 ../
drwx--x--x 23 guest guest 4.0K Jun 14 19:53 guest/
drwx--x--x 2 root root 4.0K Mar 18 13:38 lost+found/
drwx-----T 56 guest guest 8.0K Jun 14 20:08 myname/
drwx--x--x 30 mary mary 4.0K Jun 20 19:37 mary/
drwx------ 2 root root 4.0K Jun 15 18:50 .Trash-root/

[root@localhost myname]# cd /home
[root@localhost home]# chown -R myname.myname myname
[root@localhost home]# chmod -R -t myname
[root@localhost home]# ls -lah /home
total 32K
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4.0K Jun 6 23:52 ./
drwxr-xr-x 19 root adm 4.0K Jun 21 09:16 ../
drwx--x--x 23 guest guest 4.0K Jun 14 19:53 guest/
drwx--x--x 2 root root 4.0K Mar 18 13:38 lost+found/
drwx------ 56 myname myname 8.0K Jun 14 20:08 myname/
drwx--x--x 30 mary mary 4.0K Jun 20 19:37 mary/
drwx------ 2 root root 4.0K Jun 15 18:50 .Trash-root/
[root@localhost home]#

Damn IT
 

Hello Huibert,
Apparently I did speak to soon. I went t o login and I couldn't. Permissions are back to what they were...

d--------T 56 guest guest 8.0K Jun 21 10:18 myname/

What could be resetting them? My computer has been on since I posted the message above and I haven't done anything unusual (I haven't tried to modify anything). The only thing that has happened is that I logged out of root to gui login and then the screen eventually went black - the screensaver I guess. Ideas!?


:(

Uhoh,

that's a nasty problem you got there.
What bothers me the most is that not only are your permissions reset to bogus entries, but is also re-chowned to guest.guest.

This forebodes nothing good.

Could you please check /etc/passwd for any anomalies?
Every "real" user should have a "correct" homedirectory.

BTW: the user "myname" is not particulary well thought out :-)
It always reminds me of Steve-O- with his "your name" tattoo on his butt. (Because the shop advertisement said: "we tattoo your name where ever you want it")
But I'm getting OT.

Take a good look at the results of "ps ax" and look for "funny" looking procceses.
I know this is not easy for you, being a Linux newbie.

You could ofcource post the results from /etc/passwd and "ps ax" here, but only if you are _really_ sure that you have shadow passwords enabled.
Otherwise everybody and his granddad could start decrypting your passwords.


The funny thing is, that only the "myname" user permissions are reset. Could you take a look (as root) inside /home/myname and so a "ls -lah" here?
I would like to know if only the directory entry /home/myname is affected up, or if your whole home directory (recursivly).

The next thing then is reset your permissions (you know how to do it now :-) ) and periodicly check if they are still ok.
If they are screwed up, try to remeber what you have done between them being OK and broken. (what programms have been running, deamons started/stoppped, whatever)

"viel Erfolg" as we say in Germany.

Happy Hacking