passwd changing problems

[Digvijoy Chatterjee]

Hi List ,

This is my first post:

I am running RHEL-3 on a AMD-64 Sun Fire V20Z box 
when i try to change the passwd for any user including root on the
system ,the command returns as follows:
[root at Agni root]# passwd
Changing password for user root.
passwd: Authentication token manipulation error

I googled and tried pwck,grpck,pwconv,grpconv..these commands are
fine(run without errors).etc...but the problem persists.
 when i ran strace on the passwd command ,i found this:

--SNAP---(the same error is repeating again and again)
nanosleep({0, 1000000}, NULL)           = 0
open("/etc/.pwd.lock", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT, 0600) = -1 EACCES (Permission
denied)
nanosleep({0, 1000000}, NULL)           = 0
open("/etc/.pwd.lock", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT, 0600) = -1 EACCES (Permission
denied)
select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {2, 587510}) = 0 (Timeout)
write(2, "passwd: Authentication token man"..., 48passwd: Authentication
token manipulation error
) = 48
munmap(0x2a964bd000, 1060760)           = 0
munmap(0x2a965c0000, 1150904)           = 0
munmap(0x2a966d9000, 1139144)           = 0
munmap(0x2a967f0000, 1078560)           = 0
munmap(0x2a968f8000, 1099808)           = 0
munmap(0x2a96a05000, 1061912)           = 0
munmap(0x2a962b9000, 1059704)           = 0
munmap(0x2a963bc000, 1052168)           = 0
munmap(0x2a9556c000, 4096)              = 0
exit_group(1)                           = ?
 ---END------


Any Help will be highly appreciated 

------------------------SYSTEM INFO-------------------
[root at Agni root]# uname -a
Linux Agni.ad.infosys.com 2.4.21-4.EL #1 Fri Oct 3 17:39:19 EDT 2003
x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[root at Agni root]# rpm -qa |grep passwd
passwd-0.68-3
[root at Agni root]# rpm -qa |grep pam
pam-devel-0.75-51
pam-0.75-51
pam_smb-1.1.7-1
pam-devel-0.75-51
pam_krb5-1.70-1
pam_krb5-1.70-1
pam-0.75-51
spamassassin-2.55-3.1



-- 
Thanks and Regards
Digvijoy Chatterjee

Please Visit http://indra/LiMS and start your Linux Journey


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