[K12OSN] HELP..Emergency

Michael C Wescott wescott at sc.rr.com
Wed Sep 28 00:00:17 UTC 2005


On Tue, 2005-09-27 at 18:02 -0400, John T. Leonard wrote:
> Well I really did it this time...made changes in NIS and now can't log in as
> root to do anything...I can log in with my regular account but no joy on the
> 'root' login...anyone point me to a step by step fix for my predicament...I do
> have access to boot the machine by cd as it is in my office. This machine does
> my home exports to two other boxes also or I'd just dump it and finally do the
> upgrade that I've been wanting to do and import the users back from one of the
> other boxes, but I'd lose all the home dirs....  ...:-( John.........

Boot the rescue CD or a Knoppix CD. Mount the root partition read-write
and edit the broken files. 

My personal preference for NIS authentication is to exclude the "system"
accounts (root, bin, etc.) leaving them on the local system. Do this by
editting the nsswitch.conf to have it look locally before going to NIS:

       passwd:         files nis
       group:          files nis
       shadow:         files nis

Then put some or all of the system accounts into the passwd, shadow and
group files. 

If you really want to have everything served via NIS at least put an
emergency account on the machine with uid 0 that won't require NIS to
login. Handy when there are network problems or to do off line
maintenance. I usually use "toor" for that account, with /root as the
home directory.




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