I had a colleague (he left the company) that did a "hardening" on Ubuntu servers. He put the following:
useradd -D -f 30 chage --inactive 30 root
Which I understand that in 30 days the root account will expire... Now I couldn't log to root account.. because it is expired. I get a meesage saying:
Your account has expired; please contact your system administrator
Using my cloud provider portal I was able to create a new user (sudo user) and was able to change to root. But when I cange to root and put the password i'm still getting this:
Your account has expired; please contact your system administrator
su: Authentication failure
(Ignored)
Also I cannot change a password of ordinary user. I change it, then I log in and I get an authentication failure... crazy! maybe it is related to root issue..
I know that to re-enable an account I need to do it with root, but what about when the account you want to re-enable is root? :)
So, any idea about how can I fix this is welcome.
Thank you very much