root: unknown user

[roddierod]

1st the moral to this story is do not upgrade your system at 5am before your 4th cup of coffee

Anyway, that is what I did. Well I hosed the mergemaster of the group file somehow and what that did was to remove root and toor from my group file.

At first I thought the password were just blanked out until I tried

passwd root

and got the lovely error of:

root: unknown user

So my question is what is the best way to go about fixing root?

I can just adduser root or can I?
My other option seems to be to boot in single user and copy or merge the group file from /var/temproot.

OR are there other options than those two options that I've missed?

Thanks.

[DutchDaemon]

If it's only the group file you hosed I'd suggest dropping to single user and restoring the group file. By the way, root and toor are not in the group file at all. Root is part of the wheel and operator groups, that's all.

[roddierod]

Ok...root is in the wheel group when I look at the current group file.

But trying to login as root gives me incorrect password.
Trying to reset the password gives me unknown user.

I think I'm missing something here, but I don't know what?

[DutchDaemon]

Is root in /etc/master.passwd and /etc/passwd?

[roddierod]

Can't check that at the moment as ssh isn't working either it seems. But that's the first thing I'll do as soon as I get home.

I did have to adduser my normal user account also to get it to work. I was just uncomfortable doing such with root.

[roddierod]

ok, root was not in /etc/passwd or /etc/master.passwd

I tried to restore /etc/passwd, /etc/master.passwd and group from a backup file I had but that did not work either.

Any hints?

[phoenix]

Is toor list in the passwd file? If so, you can login as toor and have root access.

Do any of your users have sudo access? You can run "sudo sh" to access a root shell.

Then you can just create a new account with UID 0 and GID 0 with name root.

[roddierod]

toor didn't work.

sudo didn't work.

I tried to adduser root and it said root exists, but when I tried passwd root it said no such user....

[anomie]

It seems like your master.passwd is not in sync with its db. How about:

First, # vipw

And add the following entry if you haven't already:

root:*:0:0:Charlie &:/root:/bin/csh

Next, # pwd_mkdb

(I don't have a test box in front of me to try that on, but it seems logical.)

edit: Please back up your current /etc/passwd and /etc/master.passwd before attempting what I posted...

[roddierod]

OK...finally.

I got this right before seeing anomie's post.

But after restoring /etc/master.passwd you need to do the following:

pwd_mkdb -C /etc/master.passwd
pwd_mkdb -p /etc/master.passwd
pwd_mkdb /etc/master.passwd

this rebuilds /etc/passwd and /etc/pwd.db

after that, I could passwd root to set the password!