Nice story! Pang "Geek Life: A collection of short stories" ...hehehe.
Peace! :) 'Jopoy On Thu, 2005-07-07 at 16:12 +0800, Dong B. Calmada wrote: > Believe me, this is my first time to troubleshoot a Linux problem that I > call the root problem. > > A colleague from one of our field offices, based in North Cotabato, > complained to me over the phone that he could no longer do > administration work like adding users as he was always receiving an > error like “sudo: no passwd entry for root”. When we traced the > /etc/sudoers file, his account was not there. Of course, we could not > catenate the /etc/passwd to look whether the root entry was OK, as only > root or users with sudo permissions can do so. > > I googled ’sudo: no passwd entry for root’ and I was shown a list of > sites to show me the way. I tried almost every site to no avail. Except > with the one that instructed to boot the computer using a kernel with > new parameters, i.e., rw init=/bin/bash. So that this parameter set will > give me root permissions to troubleshoot the problem. > > I asked my colleague to restart his computer watching out for the > countdown to the Ubuntu startup. Upon pressing esc key, he was shown a > menu of boot options. I asked him to choose the default option and press > ‘e’ to display the boot entry for editing. Then at the end of the line, > I asked him to write the rw init=/bin/bash parameter. Then he pressed > enter and ‘b’. The boot proceeded. > > Then he was shown a console with the prompt ‘I have no [EMAIL PROTECTED]: ~$‘. > That gave us the idea that there was indeed something wrong with the > root account. The first thing we did was to change the root account > entry in the /etc/passwd. We were amazed to know that the root entry was > at the end of the file with the uid not being 0 and the home folder > being /home/root. In my mind, I was shouting at my colleague for > meddling with the root account. > > Then we changed the /etc/group file. We added his account to the groups > of sudo, admin and root. > > Next, we changed the /etc/sudoers file. We added his account to the > ‘user priveleges’ section. > > Lastly, we changed the ownership of the files we had changed so that > root owns them. (chown root.root 'file'). > > Restart he did to the computer. With our fingers crossed, he tried to > add users using sudo. And he succeeded. > > After two hours of working around the problem over night, we did a > virtual toast to each other. Long Live Linux! > > > (Please also comment on this entry at http://foss.peace.net.ph/?p=27.) > > _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
