On 01/30/2012 11:28 PM, Sergio Ballestrero wrote:
On 30 Jan 2012, at 23:39, Yasha Karant wrote:
Upon boot, automatic fsck failed, and a request was posted for root password.
However, no more than one character of the password would be accepted, causing
an endless loop to this condition and not allowing me control of the system
(run fsck manually).
For the next time (because there's always one ;-) ), you can use
init=/bin/bash
as a boot option, it will completely skip the standard init and therefore the
root password request.
It's anyway interesting that you could not login as root. What do you have in
nsswitch and pam.d/system-auth ?
Cheers,
Sergio
It was not that I could not login as root. The prompt was there.
However, instead of accepting the entire sequence of key presses
(characters) that constitute the root password, after the first such
character, whatever was running attempted to use the one character
"series" as the password. This single character was not the correct
password, the attempt was rejected, and the prompt for Control-D or root
password was again presented as an endless loop.
I will check both nsswitch and pam.d/system-auth when I get into the office.
I do not like the idea of having an automatic root backdoor for security
reasons (a university, in a department of computer science and
engineering, with some bright CS, CE, and Physics majors -- some of whom
do not accept in practice the ethics we attempt to instill). I have
used and will continue to use the toor kludge as an alternative to root
for situations in which the root home directory, etc., is corrupt -- but
toor also is defended, not open.
Thanks,
Yasha
