root account expired --help

[alan]

On Mon, 16 Aug 2004, James D. Parra wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> What a nice way to start a Monday. Tried to log in as root and received,
> "Your account has expired; please contact your system administrator".  Any
> way to correct this?

Hopefully you have physical access to the machine.

Boot the system with a recovery disc of some sort.  (There is one for 
Fedora, I believe.  There are others on the net.)

Mount the disk with the /etc partition on it read/write.  Edit /etc/shadow 
and remove the password expiration information.

Don't forget to backup the old one in case you bjork it up.