From: barspi@wam.umd.edu (Barzilai Spinak) Subject: BUG with passwd? Date: Sun, 28 Feb 1993 22:47:37 GMT
Hi. First, apiece of advice. Don't change your root password and forget it!
Now for the problem. I am still playing with the boot 0.99pl4 and root 0.98.
A few minutes ago I booted Linux (I havent done it for some days) and couldn't
login as root with my old password, then I remembered that the last time I was
playing with passwd and probably hadn't changed my password back before shuttingdown. After trying for a few minutes I remembered that I had changed it to a
single letter (which was, as I discovered, 'A'). After finally logging in I
typed "passwd" and when prompted for the new one I typed 'A' again because I
decided that I didn't want to change it. After that I changed to another virtualconsole and tried to login as root again. Guess what? It didn't work!
I switched to my first console and typed "ls -l /etc" and I discovered that my
passwd file was ZERO bytes long.
Then I noticed a file called 'passwd.OLD' and I must tell you that I found a
good use for it.
I tried the experiment again and confirmed that it wasn't my imagination.
Is this the regular behaviour of the passwd command or is it a bug?
Has it been solved in later versions?
WAIT!!! As I was typing this I went to the machine I am running Linux and
tried again. I tried to really change my password this time, to "aaa".
It deleted my passwd file again. I also just discovered a file called
passwd.install, it seems that it has the original passwd file (there's no
password set for root yet). I copied it over passwd and tried everything again
with the same result. Now, if this is the file that came with Linux and I was
able to change my password a couple of times before, WHY IS IT NOT WORKING NOW?
Did my passwd command break in the past days? I'm very puzzled and I am by
no means a unix wiz. Please help me!
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| o ____ / _____/ / Barzilai Spinak o |
| / / / \ barspi@wam.umd.edu |
| _____ / _____ / / barspi@eng.umd.edu |
| / / / \ ..... |
| _________/ ___/ _______/ ___/ / (-O-O-) |
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