Accidentally removed shadow package

hussar · 12-23-2005, 05:20 PM

OK, I've done something fairly stupid. I was checking what packages were installed on my machine with slapt-get when I noticed that in addition to the shadow package from slack -current I also had the shadow package from an old install of dropline gnome installed. So, I told slapt-get to remove shadow.

Well, slapt-get removed the slack -current version of shadow first, but I didn't notice it until the removal was underway. Since I hadn't yet removed the dropline version of shadow, the one I really wanted to remove, I told slapt-get to remove shadow again, which it dutifully did.

Ahem, now I can't reinstall the shadow package from slack -current, because when I removed shadow, it took su with it. In fact, I can't log in at all anymore, because I need shadow to do it.

So, I am thinking that the only way out of this is to reboot the machine using my 10.2 CD and reinstall the shadow package from CD. Can I do that? And how?

320mb · 12-23-2005, 11:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hussar

So, I am thinking that the only way out of this is to reboot the machine using my 10.2 CD and reinstall the shadow package from CD. Can I do that? And how?

yes you can.....boot your system up, mount the CD, find the DIR the shadow package is in and use the Slackware package tool feature..AS ROOT DO.....

Code:

installpkg shadow<version>.tgz

hussar · 12-24-2005, 01:45 AM

The shadow package includes /bin/login, so I will need to boot from the CD. Do I enter the boot option root=hda5 to get the CD to use my system as its root filesystem? If I do that, won't it be looking for /bin/login in the filesystem I just deleted it from?

hussar · 12-24-2005, 06:31 AM

Well, that went much easier than I had expected.

I booted from CD1 and did not enter any boot parameters. When the login prompt came up, I logged in as root, and used the following commands to mount the CD and the partition on my hard drive that contains my system's root filesystem:

mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdc /cdrom
mount -t reiserfs /dev/hda5 /mnt

Then I started pkgtool and selected the option to install from another directory. I navigated to /cdrom/slackware/a. As each of the packages was presented for install, I said no to each of the packages until I came to the shadow package. I said yes to an install of shadow, then quit pkgtool and rebooted. It worked like a charm, although I had to reset my user password for some reason. Could also be that I was just entering it incorrectly and resetting it seemed the easier way to go, since I could log in as root.

Thanks for your help and Merry Christmas!