Lo and behold, I log into my machine today, as every day, su root and it doesn't accept my root password any more. How could that possibly happen, assuming I didn't sleepwalk over to my machine during the night and change the password before going back to bed? Is it possible for me to regain control of this machine or is it game over?
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Before you reload your system try using chage to see when the password was changed (if it was) or if its simply expired. You can also check /var/log/secure. reinstalling a system simply because the password expired would be pretty silly. |
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In Ubuntu you are probably still a "sudoer", so you should be able to use |
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I like the solution of "honk" but you can shorten that:
(Can't comment" on his answer, so I'm posting a new one) |
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I have had "password" issues when my root directory (/) is 100% full. I run a cron script which rsyncs to an external hard drive which wasn't mounted at runtime. rsync doesn't care what device/partition the directory is mapped to, so it went ahead and filled up /external_hd. Normally, /external_hd is the 1TB device sitting on top of my computer tower. But when it's not mounted (e.g. the external hard drive is not on), the directory is still there, so it writes to the / partition (by default it'd create the directory anyway, I believe). Next time I restarted I couldn't log in to Ubuntu, getting an error on user name/password. Once I deleted files, everything worked as expected. I've also had this issue when running Amazon's MP3 downloader and a full /. It gives you a permissions type error and running the app under gksudo doesn't solve it. Eventually, I stopped being so lazy and changed the script to skip rsyncing to external if it wasn't mounted. |
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You can regain control by:
But: If you can't recall yourself changing the password, reinstall that machine! |
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