thanks, i booted off of the second CD and did an update of system, it fixed itself. I definitely have to rule out a hack attempt on this machine because there are no services that are running (ie: telnet, ssh...) I am currently running an fsck. also, on the update, it re-created all of the users that i had in previously (including their passwd's) till confused, ryan -----Original Message----- From: Jack Barnett To: Ryan Yagatich; SuSE Sent: 2/22/00 3:54 PM Subject: Re: [SLE] no users exist on laptop Yea, first boot of the second SuSE Linux CD-ROM (for 6.3) or the first SuSE Linux CD-ROM (for 6.2 and below), or if the laptop doesn't have a CD-ROM use the floppy disk that came with the distro. In this menu (I forgot exactly here) will be a option called "Resuce mode", boot into this mode (basically single user mode with no file systems mounted.) Run fsck on ALL drives/parations in the laptop, see if you get any errors, if so fix them. Try rebooting again, mount your drives manually. Look at the modifaction date of the /etc/passwd file, see when it was lasted changed. This way you can get some idea around the time it happened. See if you have a backup /etc/passwd from an editor like /etc/~passwd or /etc/.passwd.back, if so try and restore you password file from this. If you can find a backup of the /etc/passwd on any of your local file systems see if you have an backups on tape/zip/floppy/nfs/cd-r. If you don't you will have to re-create all the users (are there home directories/files still there?) Basically boot of cd, check some stuff, restore the missing files, if possiable or recreate if that isn't an option. Reboot the system and you should have the system back up and going. One thing that would be good to find out is /why/ the /etc/passwd or your user accounts suddenly disappeared? I know people who have laptops and the drive tend to phyiscally go "bad" quicker than desktops, since laptops get shaked, pushed, drop on a daily basicaly, where desktops ussually don't take any shock to the case/hard drive. If it is not the hard drive that went phyiscally bad, it could either be a corrupt file system (like a software error), some one delete the /etc/passwd file (maybe on accident, misbehaved program or cracker). When you are bring the system back up, not only should you be thinking about how to restore either thing, but you should also think about why and how this happened, look for odd files, though the log files, so that you can prevent it from happening again. This is getting a little long, so try that and if you have any questions drop them back to the list Jack ----- Original Message ----- From: Ryan Yagatich To: SuSE Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2000 2:29 PM Subject: [SLE] no users exist on laptop

i booted my laptop one day and all of a sudden no users existed anymore!!! the funny thing is the machine had been off for a while. Now i can't log in, any ideas?

ryan

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