[K12OSN] The "can't log in as root to fix the 'can't log in as root'" conundrum

David Hopkins dahopkins429 at gmail.com
Wed Jan 7 01:58:42 UTC 2009


Can you just use "su root" to get root ownership in a terminal session
after logging in with your normal account?  I normally use su - root
to get the full login environment, but su root should give you root
privileges, right?

Sincerely,
Dave Hopkins
Newark Charter School
Newark Delaware

On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 8:44 PM, Carl Keil <carl at snarlnet.com> wrote:
> So, returning after break I found a problem with my Centos 5 server.  It's a
> K12LTSP 5 EL 32 bit install.  I'm not serving thin clients with it, but hope
> to down the road.  I set it up so far to be a Samba/LDAP/homedir server.  I
> fired up the server and then logged into my ubuntu client authenticating via
> LDAP off the server just fine.  I wanted to adjust a configuration on the
> server so I tried to log in as root at the server's terminal.  I got a
> message saying that it couldn't log in as root because it couldn't find the
> folder /home/root.  This is really odd, because it was working fine before
> break with the usual /root folder and I never [knowingly] told it to use
> /home/root for the root folder.  Is there someway to log in and tell it to
> construct a new home folder for root if it can't find one?
>
> I tried logging in via "linux rescue" and I tried to mount the main file
> system.  I was going to change /etc/passwd to have root's homedir be /root
> but it wouldn't let me mount /dev/sda2 .  /dev/sda1 is the boot partition
> and I'm pretty sure /dev/sda2 is the other stuff.  /dev/sda1 stopped
> mounting on subsequent attempts even after rebooting, really weird.  I'm
> really flummoxed.  I don't know how this happened or what to do about it.  I
> can log in as other users just fine on the system, but I need a symlink or
> something for the /root folder.  One other complication is that /home is on
> a mirrored linux raid partition, so I don't know how to mount that in linux
> rescue mode, not that I can mount the main partition which isn't on RAID
> anyway.
>
> Can someone suggest a fix?
>
> Thanks,
>
> ck
>
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