Hey, what the...? Root denied.

[fantasma]

Hello,

Odd thing happened this morning with my Ultra 10 server. I Telnetted in and then tried to promote myself to root. My password wasn't accepted. I went to the actual machine and was faced as usual with my screensaver password prompt; I wasn't let in. I rebooted and was faced with a slow startup. I got through the logon but when CDE began to start, I was faced with a small square pop-up window that only had an "!" mark and an ok button which I was unable to click. It's a web server and the httpd isn't running either. Any idea what's going on?

Much Thanks,

fan

[stiles]

Take your box off the network. Now get your CD out and do a backdoor boot. Mount the root filesystem on "/a" and vi /etc/shadow to delete the root password (save with :x!). Bounce the box and let it come up to runlevel 3. Telnet back to the box. You were able to get into a normal account right? If not delete the normal users password (the password field is the second field, the encripted 13 character stirng). When you first login you should be prompted for a password, this should set the password, if you su to root you may not be prompted for a password, if so set root's password "passwd root"). Now at least you have root back, start looking over you log files if there are any to try to figure out what happened. You may want to try to do a reconfiguration boot to try to fix X.

[ 09 July 2001: Message edited by: stiles ]