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
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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