[19573] in Athena Bugs
New athena release 9.0
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David M. Collins)
Thu Aug 9 14:27:08 2001
Message-ID: <3B72D5DB.A2700E8@mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 09 Aug 2001 14:26:35 -0400
From: "David M. Collins" <dmcollin@MIT.EDU>
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Hi,
I have a few comments about the current athena release. I was following
the instructions to make a local account on an athena-linux machine at:
http://web.mit.edu/olh/Private/Private.html
I followed the instructions and succeeded in nuking my /etc/passwd file
so I no longer had root access. Are the instructions up to date? In
particular, what are the differences between passwd, passwd-,
passwd.fallback, and passwd.local? Should the local directory be
/home/user or /var/user? The instruction cp -r /usr/prototype_user
/var/user copies the directory across, but it seems like it should just
be the dotfiles that are copied. When I rebooted in single user mode, I
entered the root password but no longer had write priviledges. What is
the point of single user mode if I cannot repair any files?
Furthermore, athena had automagically copied a version of /etc/passwd
over /etc/fstab, so I had difficulty in mounting the files systems!!
(This definitely seems like a bug.) All of this time I could no longer
run shutdown, so I was power cycling the machine. The inevitable
happened and the hard drive was corrupted beyond repair with fsck. Not
very surprising with ext2. Would it be possible to allow a single user
mode with write access to the disk? (I can hardly see this is too much
of a security risk when you must enter the root password.)
Thanks,
David
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