Lost User

[Tim]

On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 23:26 -0500, Don Flinn wrote:

> The other week I was trying to remove OpenOffice to install OpenOffice
> 2.0 because of the repeated crashing of the Fedora version of
> OpenOffice.

That's not something that I've experienced.

> Somehow, I made my login inoperable. 

How?  What were you doing that did that?  What did you do while trying
to remove Open Office?

I can't think of anything that would do that.  Removing Open Office is
just a case of "erasing" the RPMs for it.  That doesn't do anything to
your personal files or settings.

> When I tried to login the screen went blank for some time then came
> back to the login screen.

Did you look at the logs to see if it gave an error message?  I don't
think that any of us could guess the reasons why that happened to you.

> Logging in as root I created another user.  Although I can reach the old
> user directories through /home/oldusr it is a real pain especially with
> my eudora mail (can't read my old mail).  I tried to recreate the
> password for the old user by using passwd, but that didn't cure my
> problem.  Anyone have a solution to get my old user login to work again.

A brute force clean up attempt might be to wipe out anything residing in
the /tmp directory.  I've seen old files from one user's log in, that
didn't get removed after an accident, prevent them from logging in
again.

-- 
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